Definition
An archaic spelling variant of "interline." To enterline a document is to write between the existing lines of a written instrument — inserting words, phrases, or corrections into the body of a text after the original writing was completed. The term appears in historical legal contexts primarily as a procedural fact requiring explanation or disclosure, since interlineation of a deed, will, or other instrument could raise questions about authenticity, fraud, or the timing of alterations.
Common Confusion
ENTERLINE / INTERLINE / INTERLINEATION: These three terms refer to the same act. "Enterline" is simply the older orthographic form of "interline." Modern legal sources use "interlineation" (the noun) or "interline" (the verb) exclusively. Encountering "enterline" in a historical document does not signal a different legal concept — it signals an older text. Researchers who search only for "interlineation" in pre-nineteenth-century sources may miss relevant passages that use the enterline spelling.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance here is paleographic and terminological rather than doctrinal. "Enterline" as a distinct spelling drops out of legal usage early, making it a trap for researchers working in manuscript sources, early printed reports, or colonial-era instruments. If you are examining a disputed deed, will, or bond from the seventeenth or early eighteenth century and encounter "enterline" or "enterlined," the legal analysis to apply is the same as for interlineation: courts examined whether the insertion was made before or after execution, whether it was acknowledged by the parties, and whether it altered the instrument's legal effect.
Burrill's single-entry treatment — citing Finch's Law as authority — places the term squarely in the English common law tradition before systematic spelling standardization. Researchers using Law Mind's corpus of early English legal materials should treat "enterline" as a controlled vocabulary synonym for "interline" and expand searches accordingly. Keyword searches that do not account for this variant will produce incomplete results when working in sources predating roughly 1750.
Because interlineation doctrine itself has a continuous history (touching on wills, deeds, contracts, and negotiable instruments), a finding of "enterline" in a historical source is an entry point into that broader body of law — not a dead end.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is terse: "The old form of Interline," with a single citation to Finch's Law, Book 4, Chapter 9, page 281. Henry Finch's Law, or a Discourse Thereof is a seventeenth-century treatise, and Burrill's reference to it confirms that "enterline" was already being flagged as archaic by the time systematic legal dictionaries were compiled. No other standard historical dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's early editions, Tomlins) carry a separate entry for "enterline," presumably because by their publication dates the spelling had been fully displaced by "interline" and "interlineation." The absence of the term in later dictionaries is itself informative: it marks approximately when the variant spelling ceased to be current in professional legal writing.
Burrill's contribution is taxonomic — he preserves the variant so that readers of older sources are not confused — rather than doctrinal. He offers no independent analysis of what entering a line between existing text means legally, because that analysis belongs to the interlineation entry.
Jurisdictional Note
The spelling "enterline" is an artifact of English legal usage and appears primarily in English and early American colonial sources. It carries no jurisdictional legal distinction from "interline" or "interlineation." Modern jurisdictional variation in interlineation doctrine (which is real and worth tracking) does not attach to the spelling variant itself.