Definition
To put out of possession; to dispossess, oust, or remove a person from real property. The term describes the act underlying the common law action of ejectment — the wrongful displacement of a person entitled to possession of land. In its legal sense, to eject is specifically to remove someone from possession of real property, whether by physical force, legal process, or constructive means.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An inferred object of someone else's consciousness (a technical philosophical term from the philosophy of mind, unrelated to the legal term).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To expel, dismiss, or cast forth; to thrust or drive out; to discharge — as in ejecting a person from a room or ejecting a traitor from a country; also specifically, to cast out, evict, or dispossess tenants from an estate.
The Webster's 1913 definition captures ordinary usage that overlaps substantially with the legal meaning — expelling a person, evicting tenants. The gap worth noting is precision: in legal usage, eject is confined to dispossession from real property and carries specific doctrinal weight as the operative act giving rise to the action of ejectment. The Wiktionary definition reflects a wholly unrelated philosophical usage (from the work of W.K. Clifford) that shares spelling only.
Common Confusion
Eject is sometimes used interchangeably with evict and oust in casual legal writing, but the terms carry distinct doctrinal histories. To eject implies wrongful dispossession that could sustain a common law action; to evict implies lawful removal through legal process; to oust is a broader term covering dispossession in several contexts including corporate and public-office settings. In historical sources, eject specifically signals the framework of the action of ejectment with its elaborate procedural machinery — a casual substitution of "evict" for "eject" in reading older authorities can cause a researcher to miss that procedural context entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
The operative significance of eject in the corpus is almost entirely downstream from the action of ejectment — one of the most procedurally baroque common law actions, and one that evolved dramatically between the medieval period and its abolition or reform in the nineteenth century. When reading historical sources, encountering eject should immediately trigger awareness of that procedural context.
The fictional device of the casual ejector — a notional stranger who supposedly ousted the plaintiff's lessee — was the procedural vehicle by which ejectment was transformed from a possessory action for leaseholders into the primary method of trying title to freehold land. Anderson's definition flags the casual ejector directly. When historical sources use eject in describing this fictional framework, the term is doing procedural work, not describing an actual physical removal.
Researchers should note that the Blackstone citation (3 Bl. Comm. 198-200), repeated verbatim across Black's (both editions) and Burrill's, is the anchor text for the classical definition. That convergence signals these dictionaries are not independently verifying the term — they are all drawing from the same eighteenth-century source. For pre-Blackstone usage, independent inquiry into Year Books and early equity sources is necessary.
After the common law reforms of the nineteenth century — the English Common Law Procedure Act 1852 and analogous American statutes — ejectment was simplified and the fictional machinery was abolished. The term eject in post-reform sources therefore carries a narrower, more literal meaning: actual dispossession, with no implied reference to the fictional ejector framework. A researcher reading an 1840 treatise and an 1870 treatise will find the same word doing very different procedural work.
Jurisdictional variation in American sources is significant: some states retained ejectment as a cause of action; others replaced it with statutory summary possession or unlawful detainer proceedings. In states that replaced ejectment, the term eject in older state court opinions may reference the abolished common law form, not any surviving remedy.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in near-complete agreement, and the reason is apparent: Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's reproduce the same definition word-for-word, all citing 3 Bl. Comm. 198-200. This is definitional inheritance, not independent synthesis. Anderson's adds modest value by cross-referencing EJECTIO and flagging the casual ejector, which no other source in this group does explicitly.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is any account of how the meaning of eject shifted with procedural reform. They define the term as it stood within the classical common law system without noting that the procedural context giving the term much of its technical weight had already been or was being dismantled in their own era. Researchers relying solely on these entries will get the classical meaning accurately but will miss the transitional moment entirely.
Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions diverged sharply in how they treated ejectment after the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. States following the code merged law and equity and replaced ejectment with unified civil actions for possession; others retained the ejectment form by name while simplifying its procedure. Whether eject in a given state court opinion implies the full common law action or a statutory substitute depends on the jurisdiction and period.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See EJECTMENT for the full procedural history of the action and the fictional ejector device.
See OUSTER for dispossession in contexts beyond real property possession.