Definition
In legal usage, enormous means aggravated — exceeding ordinary bounds in gravity or wrongfulness. The term appears in early common law texts as a modifier to describe wrongs of a heightened or irregular character, particularly trespasses. The older spelling variant, enormious, carried a more precise technical sense: something done without a rule or against law, as distinguished from a merely ordinary wrong.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Extremely large; greatly exceeding the common size, extent, or degree. Secondarily, exceedingly wicked or atrocious. An earlier meaning — deviating from the norm; unusual or extraordinary — survives in some contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Exceeding the usual rule, norm, or measure; out of due proportion; inordinate; abnormal. Also, exceedingly wicked; outrageous; atrocious; monstrous.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow but real. Modern readers encounter enormous as a word of size or scale. Legal usage, especially in older sources, deploys it as a term of legal quality — not merely bigness, but aggravation, irregularity, or departure from lawful rule. The closely related spelling enormious reinforces this: the legal term is about norm-violation, not magnitude.
Common Confusion
Enormous and enormious appear interchangeably in the old books and are sometimes treated as variant spellings of the same word. They are not quite identical in usage. Enormious, as defined in Brownlow's reports, specifically designated something made or done contrary to legal rule — closer to illegal or irregular than merely grave. Enormous, by contrast, functions as a general aggravating descriptor. Researchers encountering either spelling in a historical source should resist assuming the modern meaning of large and consider whether the text is indicating legal irregularity or heightened culpability instead.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law reports and pleading texts will encounter enormous most often as an adjective modifying trespass. The phrase enormous trespass does not simply mean a very large trespass in the modern sense — it signals aggravated or qualified trespass, potentially bearing on the available remedy or the seriousness of the pleading.
The variant spelling enormious, flagged in all three source dictionaries, is historically significant. Brownlow's use of it as a near-technical term — something made without a rule or against law — suggests that for a period the spelling variation may have tracked a meaningful distinction. Law Mind corpus researchers searching early reports should run searches on both spellings.
The term virtually disappears from modern legal vocabulary as a standalone defined word. It survives, if at all, embedded in phrases or as ordinary descriptive language. A researcher who encounters it in a post-18th century source is almost certainly reading it in its common English sense. A researcher in Year Books, early common law reporters, or pleading manuals should treat it as a term of art.
No substantive modern statutory or case law definition of enormous exists as an independent legal term. Its legal career is historical.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's — reproduce the same brief entry almost word for word, each defining enormous as aggravated and citing the phrase so enormous a trespass from Vaughan's Reports at page 115. All three also note the older spelling enormious and trace its technical meaning to Brownlow's Reports, part 2, page 19.
The agreement across all three sources is complete, which is itself informative: none of the major historical law dictionaries developed this term beyond the Vaughan and Brownlow references. That suggests enormous never acquired an expanded independent doctrinal definition — it remained a descriptor borrowed from common English and given qualified legal color by context and usage, rather than formal legal definition.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is any evolution in the term's meaning over time, any jurisdictional variation, or any connection to modern doctrine. The entries read as antiquarian preservation of a usage rather than active legal guidance. Researchers should treat the historical dictionary support as a starting point for source-tracing, not as a complete account of the word's legal significance.
The Burrill entry is distinctive only in including an immediately following entry — ENOUNDED, a Law French term meaning overflowed — which is unrelated to enormous but confirms the alphabetical placement and the dictionary's scope.