Definition
An Anglo-French legal term meaning understanding, meaning, or signification — that is, the sense in which a word or phrase is to be interpreted in a legal instrument or proceeding. The term appears in medieval English legal texts written in Law French and refers to the interpretive content of a word: what it is understood to mean, particularly where a term carries more than one possible meaning.
The concept is captured in the classic formulation drawn from Britton: that a single word may carry a double entendement — a double meaning — requiring the court or interpreter to determine which sense governs in context.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not a standard English word. Survives in English primarily as a borrowing from French, occasionally used in diplomatic or literary contexts to mean mutual understanding or agreement between parties.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered as an English word. The French root entendre means to hear, to understand, or to intend.
The gap here is one of register and survival: in ordinary language, the word has no settled English meaning. In historical legal usage, it is a technical term of art within the Law French vocabulary of medieval English law, referring specifically to the interpretive meaning of a legal word — closer to "signification" or "construction" than to the modern diplomatic sense of mutual understanding.
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Common Confusion
ENTENDEMENT should not be confused with INTENT or INTENTION in the modern sense. Modern legal interpretation asks what a party intended; entendement in historical usage asks what a word signifies or how it is to be understood — a distinction between subjective purpose and objective meaning. Nor should it be conflated with ENTENDRE in its standalone form, which refers to the act of hearing or understanding, while entendement names the result: the meaning produced by that understanding.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively confined to Law French sources and will not appear in modern legal texts. Researchers encountering it will do so almost exclusively in medieval English legal materials — particularly Britton and Bracton-era texts, Year Books, and early common law treatises written wholly or partly in Law French.
The key research application is textual interpretation. When a historical source invokes entendement, the author is signaling an interpretive problem: a word or phrase with more than one possible legal meaning. Identifying which entendement governed in a given case or instrument was often the core of the legal dispute.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should treat entendement as a pointer to interpretive methodology in pre-modern English law. Its appearance often marks a moment where a court or commentator is grappling with ambiguity — what modern lawyers would call a question of construction. Understanding the term helps decode the analytical structure of Law French legal argument.
One navigational trap: because the word looks French rather than English, it may be overlooked by researchers scanning for English legal vocabulary. Full-text searches of Law French materials should include both the anglicized spelling and variant forms.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, defining entendement as understanding, meaning, and signification, and citing Britton chapter 92 for the double-entendement formulation. The Britton passage — that the word mort carries a double meaning (presumably encompassing both death and the legal concept of mortmain or related senses) — is the single most instructive illustration of the term's practical legal function.
Burrill's treatment is brief but accurate. The entry does what a good Law French gloss should: it translates the term, identifies its grammatical derivation (from entendre), and illustrates its use with a primary source quotation. What Burrill does not do is situate entendement within the broader framework of Law French legal interpretation or trace how questions of double meaning were resolved in practice. Researchers needing that context must turn to the primary sources directly — Britton and the Year Books — rather than relying on the dictionary entry alone.
No other historical dictionaries in the current corpus enter this term. Its absence from later legal dictionaries reflects the narrowing of Law French usage after the seventeenth century; by the time of Jacob's Law Dictionary or Bouvier, the vocabulary had largely dropped from active practice.
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Jurisdictional Note
Entendement is specific to the historical common law of England and the Law French legal tradition it inherited. It has no counterpart in civil law systems, where interpretive vocabulary derives from Latin. Modern Anglo-American jurisdictions do not use the term; its legal relevance is entirely historical.
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