Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "from word to word" or "word for word." It describes the requirement that certain legal instruments, recitations, or pleadings be reproduced exactly as written, without alteration, paraphrase, or substitution. In historical practice, the phrase signaled that a document or passage was being quoted verbatim — that precision of language, not approximation, was the operative standard.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The phrase has no current presence in ordinary English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The phrase was confined to legal and ecclesiastical contexts even in earlier centuries.
Editorial note: Because this term never crossed into common usage, there is no gap to navigate between legal and lay meaning. Its significance is purely technical and historical.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a research artifact rather than a living legal standard. Researchers will encounter it in medieval and early modern English legal texts, particularly in treatises and registers concerned with pleading, conveyancing, and the recitation of writs. Two practical points bear emphasis.
First, de mot en mot appears in sources that predate standardized quotation conventions. When a historical pleader or treatise writer invoked this phrase, they were asserting something with legal consequence — that the words following were not a summary or translation but the exact original. Modern researchers reading these sources should treat the presence of the phrase as a signal to check whether the reproduced text actually matches its claimed source, since scribal error and deliberate alteration were common despite the verbal formula.
Second, Law French phrases like this one can be misread as Latin in older indexes and catalogs, causing retrieval failures. The phrase is French in origin and construction, not Latin, though it appears in texts that mix both languages freely. Search strategies should account for both linguistic categories when canvassing historical indexes.
The phrase also appears in close proximity to formal writ language in the sources where it survives. Burrill cites Britton (c. 22), a late thirteenth-century legal treatise attributed to John le Breton, as the primary authority. Researchers working on Britton or on the Register of Writs will find this phrase embedded in discussions of how writs must be recited and how departures from exact wording could prove fatal to a pleading.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only direct entry among the Law Mind shelf sources. Burrill defines the phrase economically — "from word to word; word for word" — and cites Britton chapter 22 as authority. No elaboration is offered, which is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Law French terms of narrow technical application.
No entry appears in Black's Law Dictionary historical editions or in Bouvier's Law Dictionary for this specific phrase, though both works contain adjacent doctrines concerning verbatim pleading requirements and the consequences of variance from prescribed writ forms. The silence of those sources does not indicate the term is obscure; it reflects that by the time American legal dictionaries were being systematically compiled in the nineteenth century, Law French had largely retreated from active practice, and phrases of this kind were already being treated as antiquarian rather than operative.
Researchers should note that Burrill's Law Dictionary is itself a mid-nineteenth-century compilation drawing heavily on English common law sources, making it a reliable guide to what historical practitioners would have understood the term to mean, even if its practical authority had already faded.
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase belongs to the common law tradition of England and has no independent American legislative or judicial development. Its relevance in American legal research is limited to historical and comparative contexts, particularly scholarship on the reception of English common law and the history of pleading.