Definition
Departable is an archaic Law French term meaning "divisible." It was used in medieval English common law to describe property — typically land — that was capable of being divided among multiple parties, particularly co-heirs or parceners. The term appears in early legal records and Year Books to indicate that a given estate or holding could be separated and allocated in distinct shares, as opposed to property that was legally indivisible.
The closely related verb form, DEPARTIR (also spelled DEPARTIER), carried the same root meaning: "to divide." DEPARTI or DEPARTY was its past participial form, meaning "divided," while LA DEPARTIE referred to "the separation" or act of division itself. These forms functioned as a cluster of terms within the Law French vocabulary of feudal property law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): divisible.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Divisible. [Obs.] — attributed to Bacon.
The legal and common meanings here are not meaningfully distinct: both point to the same concept of divisibility. However, the legal context is far narrower. In common speech, "divisible" can apply to almost anything capable of being split. In its legal usage, DEPARTABLE was a term of art applied specifically to real property in the context of co-parcenary and inheritance, where the question of whether land could be divided among heirs had significant procedural and substantive consequences under feudal tenure.
Common Confusion
DEPARTABLE should not be confused with DEPORTABLE, the modern immigration law term describing a noncitizen subject to removal from the United States. The two words share no legal relationship. The resemblance is purely phonetic and etymological, not substantive. Researchers encountering DEPARTABLE in historical property-law materials who import immigration-law associations will fundamentally misread the source.
Why It Matters in Research
DEPARTABLE is a navigational challenge precisely because it is an obsolete term confined almost entirely to early common law materials — principally Year Books and Britton — and has no meaningful presence in modern legal discourse. Researchers encountering this term in historical sources should treat it as a signal that the surrounding text concerns the divisibility of land among parceners, a central question in the law of co-parcenary inheritance.
Key research traps:
First, the term appears almost exclusively in Law French sources. Glosses and translations in later English-language digests may render it simply as "divisible" without flagging its specific property-law context, which can cause the parcenary dimension to drop out of view.
Second, the verb cluster — DEPARTIR, DEPARTI, DEPARTY, LA DEPARTIE — will appear in closely adjacent sources and should be understood as part of the same conceptual family. Searching only for "departable" will miss the verb forms, which may carry the operative language in a given passage.
Third, the Year Book reference (T. 2 Edw. III. 5) and the citations to Britton (c. 72) are among the few anchored primary-source locations for this term. Researchers working in the early fourteenth-century common law of land will find these texts the most direct sources; later treatise literature does not generally preserve this vocabulary.
Fourth, this term has no meaningful connection to the modern immigration law concept of "departure" or "deportable," despite superficial phonetic similarity. Do not conflate DEPARTABLE with DEPORTABLE, which is an entirely separate term of art in modern immigration law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole substantive historical legal dictionary treatment of this term. Burrill defines it concisely as "L. Fr. Divisible" and anchors the definition with two primary-source references: Britton c. 72 and Year Book T. 2 Edw. III. 5. He also provides the associated verb and participial forms (DEPARTIR, DEPARTI, DEPARTY) along with a phrase from Britton illustrating use in the parcenary context: "pur ceo que rien remeynt à departir entre les autres parceners" — "because nothing remains to divide between the other parceners." This phrase is instructive: it shows DEPARTIR functioning as the operative verb in a passage concerning what remains after distribution to co-heirs, confirming the term's role in the administration of shared inheritances.
Webster's 1913 records the common English form as obsolete, citing Bacon, which confirms the term had already passed out of active usage by the early modern period. No other historical legal dictionaries in the current Law Mind corpus include a treatment of this term. Burrill's entry is therefore both the primary and the ceiling of available historical dictionary support.