Definition
An obsolete spelling variant of demurrage. The term carries no independent legal meaning and is encountered only in historical legal texts. Researchers who encounter "demorage" in primary sources should treat it as equivalent to demurrage — the compensation owed to a shipowner or carrier when a charterer or consignee detains a vessel beyond the agreed laytime for loading or unloading.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of demurrage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Demurrage. [Obs.] (Pepys, 1663).
The term has no life in either modern common or legal usage. It survives only as a documentary artifact. The legal meaning it once represented belongs entirely to its successor term, demurrage.
Common Confusion
Demorage and demurrage are the same concept at different moments in spelling history. The risk is not conflation of two distinct ideas but misidentification — a researcher unfamiliar with the variant may fail to recognize the term at all, or may search for it independently and find nothing useful. Always map demorage to demurrage when indexing or searching historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
The sole research significance of demorage is orthographic: it is a period spelling that can cause a document to fall outside keyword searches built around the modern form. Burrill cites 1 W. Bl. 291 (a William Blackstone King's Bench report) as authority for the form, placing the variant in English common law sources of the mid-eighteenth century. Pepys's use in 1663 pushes the documentary trail back into the Restoration period.
Researchers working in admiralty, shipping, or mercantile law sources predating approximately 1750 should account for this variant when constructing search strings or reviewing manuscript and printed records. Once identified, no separate legal analysis is required — the substantive doctrine is demurrage, and all treatise commentary, case law, and statutory development runs under that head.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is a single-sentence cross-reference: "An old form of Demurrage, (q.v.) 1 W. Bl. 291." It adds nothing substantive beyond identifying the variant and anchoring it to a specific report. Webster's 1913 similarly marks the word obsolete and attributes it to Pepys. No historical source treats demorage as a term with independent doctrinal content, and none should. The historical dictionaries are in complete agreement that this is a spelling fossil, not a distinct legal concept.