Definition
A Law French term appearing in medieval English legal texts with a cluster of related meanings depending on context: (1) to understand or be understood; (2) to intend or signify; and (3) to attend. The term appears most characteristically in the formulaic construction *et fait à entendre* — "and it is to be understood" — used in early legal instruments and treatises to signal that what follows is the operative interpretation of a preceding statement or provision. As a standalone word, *entendre* functions less as a term of art than as a structural signal in legal French, orienting the reader toward the authoritative meaning of a text.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A meaning, especially one that is implied rather than explicitly stated. Most familiar to modern English speakers through the phrase "double entendre," denoting a statement carrying two meanings, one typically risqué.
Historical common usage: The word does not appear as a standalone English entry in Webster's 1913, reflecting its status as a French borrowing rather than a naturalized English term.
The gap between common and legal usage here is nearly total. In modern English, *entendre* survives almost exclusively in the idiom "double entendre," where it carries connotations of ambiguity and innuendo. In legal French sources, the term carries the opposite freight: it is an instrument of clarification and authoritative construction, not deliberate ambiguity. A researcher encountering *entendre* in a medieval pleading or treatise should resist any association with wordplay and read it as a directive toward a singular, intended meaning.
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Common Confusion
Do not conflate the legal use of *entendre* with the modern English idiom "double entendre." The phrase *double entendre* is itself a pseudo-French construction — standard French uses *double entente* — and carries meanings of deliberate ambiguity that are opposite to *entendre*'s function in legal texts, where it signals intended or authoritative meaning. The two uses share a word but not a purpose.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal materials — particularly Year Books, Bracton, Britton, and related medieval treatises — will encounter *entendre* and its formulaic compounds as standard features of Law French drafting. The key navigational point is that *entendre* is almost never a substantive term of art on its own; it functions grammatically within a phrase that carries the legal weight. The construction *et fait à entendre* (and it is to be understood) is a construction of authoritative interpretation, signaling that the writer is supplying the legal sense of what precedes it — roughly analogous to the Latin *id est* or the modern drafting formula "that is to say."
Researchers should also be alert to the word's three distinct senses — understanding, intending, and attending — which do not always carry the same legal implications. Context and the surrounding Law French will generally resolve the ambiguity, but mistranslating *entendre* as merely "to attend" in a passage concerned with the intended meaning of a legal obligation could produce a significant misreading.
Because Law French declined sharply after the seventeenth century and was effectively abolished in English legal proceedings by the mid-eighteenth century, *entendre* in its legal sense is almost entirely a historical artifact. Researchers will not encounter it in modern instruments or opinions except as a quotation from historical sources.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary captures the essential range of the term's meanings: understanding (*et fait à entendre*), intending (per the Law French dictionary citation), and attending (per Kelham). Burrill's entry is useful precisely because it preserves all three senses without collapsing them, which reflects the actual ambiguity of the word across different medieval legal contexts. The citation to Britton (chapter 40) grounds the "to be understood" construction in an identifiable source — Britton being one of the foundational thirteenth-century English law treatises — which gives researchers a textual anchor for the term's most common legal deployment.
What historical dictionaries do not address is the relationship between this term and the modern idiom "double entendre," presumably because no such confusion existed at the time of their compilation. That gap has become a genuine research trap in the modern period, and no historical dictionary source flags it.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to the English common law tradition as it developed through Law French. It does not appear as a term of art in civil law jurisdictions, Scots law sources using Latin rather than French as the learned language, or American legal instruments beyond quotation of historical English authorities.
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