Definition
Donee is the party who receives a gift, grant, or bequest from another. The term carries distinct legal meanings depending on context and historical period, and a researcher must attend carefully to which sense is operative.
1. GIFT LAW (modern general usage): The recipient of a gift — real, personal, or testamentary — made voluntarily and without consideration by a donor.
2. FEUDAL AND EARLY ENGLISH LAW: The grantee of a donatio — a conveyance of land made as a gift. Under the early feudal system, land granted by a lord was received by the donee, who held it subject to the conditions of the original gift.
3. ESTATE TAIL (post-De Donis): Following the Statute De Donis Conditionalibus (1285), donee acquired a specific technical meaning: the person to whom lands and tenements were granted in fee tail. Littleton uses the term in this sense in his Tenures (§ 57). The donee in tail held an estate that could not be freely alienated and which descended to bodily heirs according to the conditions of the original grant.
4. POWERS OF APPOINTMENT (American and modern equity practice): The donee of a power is the person upon whom a power of appointment has been conferred by the instrument creating it — a will, trust, or deed. The donee exercises (or "executes") the power by appointing the property to the objects of the power. In this context the donee is also called the appointor or the appointer. This usage is the most significant in modern American practice.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone who receives a gift from a donor.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The person to whom a gift or donation is made; anciently, one to whom lands were given; in later use, one to whom lands given in tail; in modern use, one on whom a power is conferred for execution.
The ordinary meaning captures only the gift-recipient sense. The legally significant modern usage — donee of a power of appointment — is something quite different: the donee here does not receive property outright but is instead entrusted with the authority to direct where property goes. A donee of a power may never personally benefit from the property at all.
Common Confusion
DONEE VS. DONOR
The donor makes the gift or creates the power; the donee receives the gift or holds the power. In powers of appointment, the donor is the creator of the trust or instrument; the donee is neither the creator nor necessarily the beneficiary.
Why It Matters in Research
The word donee is a term that has traveled through three distinct legal eras, and its meaning shifts substantially depending on the period and document type being consulted.
In medieval and early English sources, donee means the feudal grantee of land. Researchers working with records from this period should understand the term against the backdrop of the Statute De Donis Conditionalibus and the law of entailed estates. Black's (1st Ed.) and Black's (2nd Ed.) both signal this historical layer explicitly.
In nineteenth-century American sources, the dominant technical usage is donee of a power of appointment. Kent's Commentaries (vol. 4) is the anchor citation across multiple historical dictionaries for this meaning. Burrill's note that New York's Revised Statutes substituted the term "grantee" for "donee" in this context is a critical research trap: a New York statute or case from this period may use grantee where other jurisdictions and treatises say donee.
In modern trust and estate drafting, donee of a power remains the standard term and appears in Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Other Donative Transfers as well as the Uniform Powers of Appointment Act (2013). Researchers working with modern instruments should be alert to whether the donee holds a general power (exercisable in favor of the donee, the donee's estate, the donee's creditors, or creditors of the donee's estate) or a nongeneral (special) power, as the tax and property consequences differ dramatically.
For gift law generally, donee is stable and unambiguous — the recipient. The complexity lives in powers of appointment.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four shelf sources agree on the core progression: feudal grantee → tenant in tail → donee of a power. The sources are consistent in their architecture, though they differ in depth.
Black's (1st Ed.) confines itself to the feudal and estate-tail meanings without discussing powers of appointment in detail, leaving the modern American usage underrepresented. Black's (2nd Ed.) adds the powers-of-appointment sense with the citation to Kent.
Bouvier's is the most practically focused of the four, giving equal weight to the gift sense and the powers sense, and expressly noting that the donee of a power is "sometimes called an appointee" — though this equates two roles that modern practice carefully distinguishes (the appointee is the recipient under the power, not the holder of it). This is a point where Bouvier's language is potentially misleading to a modern reader.
Burrill's is the most complete historical account. It preserves the Latin forms (donatarius, donatorius), traces the term through Littleton's Tenures, and provides the New York statutory note about substitution of "grantee." Burrill also correctly states that in modern American law the donee is "the party executing a power" — language that captures the active, instrumental role of the donee in the powers context rather than the passive receiving role in the gift context.
Webster's 1913, notably, mirrors the legal dictionaries almost verbatim in its layered historical progression, suggesting that by the late nineteenth century this technical legal structure had passed into general educated usage.
Jurisdictional Note
New York's early Revised Statutes replaced the term "donee" with "grantee" in the context of powers of appointment, as noted in Burrill's. Researchers working in New York materials from the nineteenth century should account for this substitution. Modern uniform acts and Restatement provisions have largely standardized terminology across American jurisdictions.