Definition
Crimen innominatum is a Latin phrase meaning "the nameless crime." In historical English and common law usage, the term functioned as a euphemistic designation for buggery or sodomy — anal intercourse, whether between men or between a human and an animal. Courts and legal writers of earlier centuries routinely avoided explicit naming of the offense, treating the act itself as too serious or too indecent to be described directly in legal texts. The phrase thus served as a formal term of art that simultaneously identified and declined to define the conduct it condemned.
The term is not operative in modern law. Contemporary statutes and constitutions name sexual offenses expressly, and the constitutional landscape governing adult consensual conduct has shifted fundamentally. Crimen innominatum survives only in historical legal literature and as a subject of legal history scholarship.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard entry. The phrase is not part of ordinary English vocabulary.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded as a standalone entry. The component words — crimen (Latin: crime, accusation) and innominatum (Latin: unnamed, without a name) — would have been understood by classically educated readers of the period.
There is no meaningful gap between common and legal usage to bridge here: the term was never part of ordinary English, and its Latin construction signals its exclusively legal and ecclesiastical register. Its opacity was intentional.
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Common Confusion
Crimen innominatum is sometimes loosely equated with the phrase "the crime against nature," which appears frequently in American statutory law from the colonial period through the twentieth century. The two phrases overlap substantially in what they denoted, but they are not identical. "Crime against nature" is an English-language statutory term with its own independent doctrinal history and varying judicial constructions across jurisdictions. Crimen innominatum, by contrast, is a Latinate term drawn from English common law and ecclesiastical tradition. Researchers should not assume that any source using one phrase is interchangeable with a source using the other.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter crimen innominatum almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century English treatises, older editions of Black's Law Dictionary, and historical case law from English courts or early American courts applying English common law principles. Several navigational points are essential:
First, the deliberate vagueness of the term created genuine doctrinal ambiguity. Historical courts disagreed about the precise scope of the offense — whether it required penetration, whether it extended to all same-sex conduct, and whether it applied equally to female participants. A researcher tracing the definition across sources will find inconsistency. That inconsistency is itself historically significant.
Second, because the term was considered too indecent to discuss openly, primary source material is often sparse, oblique, or encoded in similarly euphemistic language. Legal writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently cited the offense while refusing to describe it. Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries called it a crime "not fit to be named" — a phrase that became a standard formulation. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should treat such phrases as signals pointing toward the same body of doctrine.
Third, the ecclesiastical courts and the common law courts both claimed jurisdiction over this conduct at various points in English legal history. The transfer of jurisdiction — and the doctrinal consequences of that transfer — is a recurring theme in scholarship on this term. Sources may reflect either tradition without signaling which.
Fourth, American legal history researchers should be alert to the substitution of "crime against nature" or "infamous crime against nature" in domestic statutes, which were often enacted without further definition and carried over common law meanings by reference. The constitutional invalidation of sodomy laws by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) effectively ended prosecutorial use of these statutes, but historical sources using crimen innominatum predate that development entirely.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines crimen innominatum simply and directly as "the nameless crime," identifying it as a term for buggery or sodomy. The entry is brief — characteristically so for this term across historical dictionaries — reflecting the same reluctance to elaborate that shaped the primary sources themselves.
The adjacent Black's entry for crimen laesae majestatis (high treason) appears in some editions immediately following crimen innominatum, a juxtaposition that reflects alphabetical organization rather than conceptual connection, but which occasionally leads researchers to conflate the two terms in scanning historical text. They are entirely unrelated offenses.
Historical legal dictionaries are largely unhelpful in unpacking the scope of the offense. They define by naming — buggery, sodomy — without resolving the internal doctrinal debates about what conduct those terms encompassed. For substantive analysis, researchers must move beyond dictionaries to treatise literature, particularly Blackstone's Commentaries (Book IV) and the works of later commentators who engaged, however guardedly, with the elements of the offense.
No historical dictionary entry surveyed provides a satisfactory account of the ecclesiastical-to-common-law jurisdictional transfer, or of the regional variation that developed in American courts interpreting similar statutes.
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Jurisdictional Note
Crimen innominatum as a term is specific to English common law and its American successors. Civil law jurisdictions did not use this phrase. Within American law, the substantive offense it described was codified under varying statutory terms — "buggery," "sodomy," "crime against nature," "infamous crime against nature" — that carry their own jurisdictional histories and should be researched independently.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Sodomy
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Sexual Offenses in Historical Law
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Crime Against Nature
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