Definition
An archaic legal term, now entirely obsolete, meaning to inform — that is, to give notice, to make known, or to bring a matter formally to the attention of a court or officer. Burrill identifies it simply as the old form of "inform," citing early law reports. The term appears in early modern English legal records and pleadings but was displaced by "inform" well before the nineteenth century.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To form; to fashion; to shape.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To form; to fashion. [Obs.] — Spenser.
The common meaning (to shape or fashion something) and the legal meaning (to inform or give notice) are entirely distinct. A researcher encountering "enform" in an early legal record should resist any inference that it refers to forming or fashioning a document or instrument. In legal contexts, the word carried the communicative meaning of "inform," not the constructive meaning preserved in literary usage.
Common Confusion
ENFORM / INFORM: These are not two different legal concepts — they are the same concept in two orthographic periods. "Enform" is simply the earlier spelling. A researcher who treats them as distinct terms, or who searches only for one form, will miss sources. In early law reports, spelling standardization was inconsistent, and both forms may appear in materials from overlapping periods. Do not assign separate legal significance to the variant spelling.
Why It Matters in Research
This term matters almost exclusively as a spelling variant trap. Researchers working in pre-eighteenth-century English legal sources — Year Books, early law reports, Elizabethan and Jacobean pleadings — may encounter "enform" where a modern source would use "inform." Failure to recognize the equivalence can cause a researcher to misread procedural passages or to treat a familiar concept as obscure.
Burrill's citation to 2 Leon. 3 (Leonard's Reports, a collection of late sixteenth-century English cases) anchors the term in the Elizabethan period. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should treat "enform" as a search variant whenever working with sources from roughly 1550–1700. Full-text searches for "inform" in that period will not automatically surface "enform," and vice versa.
The term has no independent doctrinal significance. It does not mark a distinct legal procedure or standard. Its only value to the modern researcher is orthographic: knowing that the spelling existed prevents misreading and missed hits.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill disposes of the term in a single line, correctly identifying it as a superseded spelling and pointing to Leonard's Reports for documentary support. The entry is accurate as far as it goes but offers no elaboration on the contexts in which the term appeared — pleadings, informations filed in court, notices to parties, or judicial communications. Older dictionaries uniformly treat this as a mere orthographic artifact rather than a term of art, which is the correct approach. No historical legal dictionary assigns "enform" a meaning distinct from "inform," and none should. The Webster's 1913 gloss (to form, to fashion) reflects the literary, not legal, lineage of the word and should not be imported into legal interpretation.