Definition
A canon of statutory interpretation holding that words in a statute are to be understood according to their common and approved usage — that is, the ordinary meaning familiar to speakers of the language at the time of enactment — rather than according to technical, archaic, or specialized definitions. The principle reflects a foundational assumption of legislative drafting: that lawmakers use words as the general public understands them, unless the statute itself signals a departure from that ordinary meaning.
When applied, the canon directs a court or researcher to ask not what a word might mean in a specialized trade, profession, or legal subfield, but what a competent speaker of ordinary English would have understood it to mean when the statute was written or enacted.
Common Confusion
This canon is frequently conflated with the plain meaning rule as that phrase is used in modern administrative and constitutional law. The two are functionally close but not identical. "Plain meaning" in modern usage often refers to a broader methodological commitment to text over legislative history; "common and approved usage" is a more specific tool for resolving word-level ambiguity by reference to ordinary language. Researchers should not assume that a historical court invoking common-and-approved-usage was making the same argument as a modern court invoking plain meaning textualism.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears as a discrete interpretive rule in older American legal literature and court opinions, but researchers will rarely find it indexed as a standalone term in modern statutory interpretation materials. It has been absorbed into the broader family of canons now typically grouped under the heading "plain meaning rule" or "ordinary meaning canon." Searching for the phrase verbatim in historical sources, rather than its modern functional equivalents, is often necessary when working with nineteenth-century Kentucky cases, treatises of that era, or any materials citing the Rapalje & Lawrence dictionary tradition.
The Rapalje & Lawrence citation to 11 Bush (Ky.) 689 places this principle squarely in the post-Civil War Kentucky appellate tradition. Researchers working with Kentucky statutory materials from that period should treat this canon as live doctrine in that jurisdiction's caselaw and be alert to its application wherever a court is resolving a dispute over the ordinary versus technical meaning of a statutory term.
A key research trap: historical sources frequently blend this canon with related but distinct principles — such as the rule that technical terms in a statute are construed according to their technical meaning, or that terms of art in a particular trade carry their trade meaning. These are not the same rule. The common-and-approved-usage canon operates as the default; the technical-meaning rule is the exception. Conflating them in historical research will produce misreadings of how a court resolved a textual dispute.
Modern statutory interpretation scholarship treats the ordinary meaning canon as well settled, but the historical phrase "common and approved usage" carries a slightly narrower connotation: it implies not merely what the word means in general, but what usage has been accepted and sanctioned — approved — by educated speakers. This nuance matters when tracing how nineteenth-century courts distinguished between a word's currency (how widely used) and its legitimacy (how correctly used).
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence compress this principle into a single entry keyed to 11 Bush (Ky.) 689, treating "common and approved usage of language" as the operative standard for construing statutory terms. The brevity of the entry reflects the era's assumption that this canon was so well established as to require no extended exposition — it was a touchstone, not a contested rule.
What historical dictionaries of this type generally do not supply is any analysis of how courts weighed this canon against competing interpretive principles, or how they handled the temporal question — whose common usage, and at what point in time. Those gaps require researchers to move from the dictionary entry to the underlying caselaw and to period treatises on statutory construction, such as those by Sedgwick or Endlich, which address the principle at greater length.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is notable for framing the canon specifically in the statutory context. The principle has parallel application in contract and will construction, but the dictionary isolates its operation in legislation — a useful signal that the nineteenth-century bar understood statutory and private-document construction as governed by related but not identical rules.