Definition
An archaic verb meaning to dress a distaff with flax or tow in preparation for spinning. In legal and historical contexts, the term appears rarely and carries its craft meaning without significant juridical transformation — it describes a step in the preparation of fiber for hand-spinning, specifically the act of loading raw flax or tow onto a distaff so that thread may be drawn from it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To dress with flax for spinning, as a distaff; to dizen. To put tow on a distaff.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately available in the source material provided.
The common and legal meanings here are essentially continuous. The word carries no specialized juridical sense distinct from its craft meaning. Where it appears in legal instruments — most likely in agricultural leases, probate inventories, or household goods schedules — it retains its plain meaning as a term of textile craft.
Common Confusion
Researchers working with manuscript sources should guard against two transcription errors. First, "dize" can be misread as "dise" or "dyse," neither of which carries the same meaning. Second, and more critically, "dize" in a handwritten inventory may be misread as "size" (a coating agent used in cloth finishing) or — more dangerously — as an abbreviated or variant spelling of "devise," a term of central importance in probate and property law. The words are unrelated; context (textile inventories, household goods, distaffs) should resolve ambiguity.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter "dize" in probate inventories, household goods appraisals, agricultural indentures, or estate records from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, when home textile production was economically significant and legally consequential. In this corpus, precision matters: a distaff dressed with flax ("dized") was a tool in active use and would be valued differently from an unloaded distaff or raw fiber stock.
The term is rare in formal legal instruments but may appear in schedules of personal property attached to wills or lease agreements specifying the condition of a household's productive equipment. Researchers should not confuse passing references to "dize" or "dizen" with the more common term "devise" — in handwritten historical documents, spelling variation and abbreviation create genuine transcription hazards.
Because Burrill's entry appears to have been corrupted or misfiled in the source material — the text supplied under this headword is plainly misassigned, describing instead the Latin phrase "de gradu in gradum" (from degree to degree) and discussing the Statute of Frauds — researchers relying on that dictionary must treat the physical entry with caution. The substance delivered under "DIZE" in the available Burrill text belongs to a different headword entirely.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical legal dictionary source consulted. As noted, the text supplied under this headword in the available version does not define "dize" at all. The content — discussing "de gradu in gradum," Bracton, Fleta, the Statute of Frauds, and a Massachusetts case citation involving corporate stock — is a misplaced or misprinted entry. No reliable historical legal definition of "dize" can be drawn from Burrill on the basis of this text. Researchers should treat that entry as bibliographically unreliable for this headword and consult period craft glossaries, agricultural lease annotations, or probate record guides for contextual grounding.
The Wiktionary definition, consistent with general historical usage, provides the working definition: to load a distaff with fiber. This is not a term with a contested legal meaning or a history of judicial interpretation.