Definition
In law, "employed" carries a dual meaning that courts and statutes have consistently recognized:
1. The act of actively doing a thing — performing work or carrying out a task at a given moment.
2. The state of being under contract or orders to do a thing — the existing relationship by which a person is engaged to perform services, regardless of whether active performance is occurring at the precise instant in question.
The second meaning is the more consequential in legal contexts. A person may be "employed" in the legal sense even when not actively working — during transit to or from a worksite, between discrete tasks, or while on authorized break — because the contractual or directive relationship persists. This distinction between momentary activity and relational status is critical in employment law, workers' compensation, and statutory construction.
When used in ordinary commercial and business affairs, "employed" consistently implies a request, a contract, and a corresponding expectation of compensation. Courts have treated the term in employment statutes as describing the conventional relation of employer and employee in its natural, everyday sense rather than any technical departure from that meaning.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In a job; working. Also: used; in use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Occupied; busy; at work; also, held in service; as, an employed agent.
The gap between common and legal meaning is subtle but consequential. Ordinary usage treats "employed" as synonymous with "currently working" — an active, present-tense condition. Legal usage adds a relational dimension: a person remains employed while traveling to a worksite, between shifts, or during periods of authorized absence, because employment is a status arising from contract or orders, not merely from the physical act of performing work at a given instant. Statutory coverage often turns on this distinction.
Common Confusion
"Employed" is sometimes conflated with "at work" or "on duty." These are not equivalent. A worker injured while traveling to a job site may be "employed" for statutory purposes without being "at work" in the colloquial sense. Conversely, an independent contractor may be actively performing tasks without being "employed" under a given statute's definition. The question of whether someone is employed is a threshold status question; whether they are performing services at a moment in time is a separate factual question that may or may not govern coverage or liability under a particular legal scheme.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning recognized in historical sources — active performance versus contractual status — directly controls coverage disputes in workers' compensation, employers' liability statutes, and benefit eligibility claims. Researchers examining pre-twentieth-century cases should be alert to opinions that use "employed" to mean only the act of working, without addressing the relational dimension; the status-based reading became dominant as employment legislation expanded.
The Employers' Liability Act cases are a reliable anchor: courts interpreting that statute consistently read "employed" in its natural, conventional sense, resisting narrower or more technical constructions. When researching statutory interpretation disputes about who qualifies as "employed" under a specific act, start with the statute's own definitional provisions before relying on common law glosses, since modern employment statutes frequently supply their own definitions that may expand or contract the term's ordinary reach.
Historical sources indexed under "employ," "employee," or "employment" may contain the most relevant material; "employed" as a standalone headword is relatively sparse in the historical dictionaries, with the most substantive treatment appearing under related entries. Cross-reference worksite coverage cases carefully: courts applying the "employed in and about the works" language reached expansive conclusions about when employment status attaches and detaches relative to physical presence at the work location.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Bouvier's converge on the dual-meaning formulation: "employed" signifies both the act of doing a thing and the being under contract or orders to do it. This is a rare instance of near-complete agreement across the shelf sources on a definitional point.
Bouvier's adds useful case-law gloss from the Employers' Liability Act context, noting that the term was used "in its natural sense" to describe the conventional employer-employee relation. The same source records the worksite coverage principle — workers described as employed "in and about the works" were covered even between the bottom of a mine and the surface, illustrating how courts stretched the status reading to provide continuity of coverage.
What historical sources do not adequately address is the modern administrative and regulatory elaboration of "employed," including the treatment of gig workers, statutory employees, and multi-factor economic realities tests. Researchers working on contemporary employment classification disputes will find the historical dictionary definitions necessary but insufficient.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal and state statutes frequently define "employed" or "employee" independently, and those definitions control over common law meaning within their respective schemes. The Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and state workers' compensation codes each supply their own tests, which may diverge significantly from one another and from the common law relational definition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia: Employment Law; Employer-Employee Relationship; Workers' Compensation