Definition
A Law French phrase meaning, literally, "to open the eyes." Used in early English legal records and proceedings to describe the act of restoring sight or, more broadly, the removal of a blindness or impediment — whether physical or figurative — that had prevented a party from perceiving or understanding a matter bearing on their legal position. The phrase appears in medieval and early modern legal contexts, particularly in equity-adjacent proceedings where ignorance, concealment, or fraud was alleged to have prevented a party from timely asserting a right.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The phrase is archaic French with no current common usage in English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The phrase had already passed from common use well before the nineteenth century.
The term belongs entirely to the Law French stratum of the English legal lexicon and has no meaningful overlap with any contemporary common usage. It survives only in historical legal records and the dictionaries that catalogued them.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase will almost exclusively find it in medieval and early modern English legal manuscripts, Year Books, or in secondary sources that transcribe or gloss those materials. Its appearance signals proximity to equitable reasoning — specifically arguments that a party's legal position should be excused or extended because concealment, fraud, or some other impediment had effectively "closed their eyes" to the facts or rights at issue.
The practical navigational point: if this phrase appears in a source you are reading, you are likely dealing with a plea or argument about knowledge, notice, or the excuse of ignorance — concepts that feed directly into the later development of equitable doctrines such as fraud on concealment, laches, and the discovery rule in limitations law. The phrase itself will not appear in modern sources, but its functional descendants are pervasive.
Researchers should also note that Law French orthography was highly variable across manuscript sources. Variant spellings — including "desciller," "dessiller," or "déciller" — may appear depending on the scribe, the period, and whether the manuscript has been modernized in transcription. Kelham's glossary, cited by Burrill, is among the few reference works that catalogued this specific phrase, making it a useful checkpoint when the phrase is encountered in its source context.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole identified source for this term in the Law Mind corpus, and its entry is spare: the phrase, the translation ("to open the eyes"), and a citation to Kelham. Robert Kelham's *A Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779) is the underlying authority, and Burrill does not expand on the usage context.
No entry appears in Bouvier, Black's early editions, or other major historical dictionaries canvassed for this project, which suggests the phrase was already receding from active legal use by the time those works were compiled in the nineteenth century. Its preservation in Burrill reflects that work's broader ambition to capture the Law French and Latin residue of the English common law tradition, including terms no longer in operational use.
The narrowness of the historical record here is itself informative: this is a phrase worth knowing how to identify and translate, but researchers should not expect doctrinal elaboration in the historical dictionary literature. The conceptual work the phrase once did was absorbed into equity's substantive vocabulary long before systematic legal dictionaries were compiled.
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