Definition
To solicit, persuade, or procure another person to act in a manner that serves the enticer's purpose, typically by allurement, inducement, or exploitation of desire. In legal usage, entice carries operative weight in at least three distinct contexts:
1. Criminal law. To lure a person — most commonly a minor — away from lawful custody or into a situation for unlawful purposes. Statutes criminalizing the enticement of children focus on the deliberate inducement of a minor to meet, travel, or engage in conduct for sexual or other exploitative purposes.
2. Domestic relations. To draw away a spouse or servant from their domestic or employment duties, giving rise to a civil cause of action by the aggrieved party. At common law, a husband could recover damages against a third party who enticed his wife away; similarly, an employer could sue one who enticed away a contracted employee.
3. Military law. To solicit or procure desertion from the armed forces, a federal criminal offense under historical and current statutes.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To lure; to attract by arousing desire or hope.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To draw on, by exciting hope or desire; to allure; to attract. Often in a bad sense: to lead astray; to induce to evil; to tempt.
The common meaning is descriptively neutral — one can be enticed by a dessert menu or a sale price — carrying only mild moral coloring depending on context. The legal meaning is never neutral. In every legal application, entice connotes deliberate inducement toward a legally cognizable harm: desertion, abandonment of marital duty, exploitation of a minor, or breach of a labor obligation. The word's ordinariness is itself a research trap: historical pleadings using "entice" are making a specific legal allegation, not merely describing an attraction.
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Common Confusion
ENTICE vs. ABDUCT. Both terms can appear in cases involving the removal of a person from lawful custody, but they describe distinct wrongs. Abduction involves force, threat, or taking without consent. Enticement involves inducement — the person is persuaded or lured rather than seized. The distinction matters in criminal charging, in civil pleading, and in historical sources where the two terms are sometimes used loosely as near-synonyms. Anderson's Dictionary of Law cross-references both ABDUCTION and HUSBAND under this entry, signaling that courts historically treated the overlap as worth flagging.
ENTICE vs. SOLICIT. Statutes and courts sometimes use solicit and entice interchangeably; the historical dictionaries define entice as "to solicit, persuade, or procure." In modern criminal law, particularly in child exploitation statutes, entice has acquired a more specific statutory meaning that may differ from solicitation offenses. Researchers should check the operative statute's own definitions rather than assuming equivalence.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Enticement of a child. The most heavily litigated modern form. Federal and state statutes target the use of communications, travel, or inducement to lure minors for sexual purposes. The elements and penalties vary significantly by jurisdiction and statute.
Enticement of a spouse (alienation of affections / criminal conversation). The historical civil action by which a husband (and later, a spouse of either sex) could recover damages from a third party who enticed the other spouse away. Now abolished in most U.S. jurisdictions but still recognized in a minority of states.
Enticement to desert. The federal criminal offense of inducing members of the armed forces to abandon their duty. Addressed in historical Revised Statutes provisions and carried forward in modern federal criminal law.
Enticement of an employee. The common law tort of inducing a servant or contracted employee to leave their employment. Substantially evolved into modern tortious interference with contract doctrine.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter entice across sharply different legal domains — criminal, domestic relations, labor, and military — and the applicable doctrine shifts entirely depending on context. A 19th-century case using "entice" in a domestic relations posture is governed by a body of law that has been substantially abolished; a modern case using the same word in a criminal context may invoke detailed federal statutory frameworks. Do not carry definitional assumptions across these domains.
The historical civil action for enticement of a spouse is closely linked to alienation of affections and criminal conversation, and sources from the 19th and early 20th centuries often treat these as overlapping or interchangeable. Bouvier's citation to Colorado, Massachusetts, and Vermont cases for spousal enticement claims reflects a period when this was active, contested litigation. Researchers tracing that line of cases will need to identify the point at which their target jurisdiction abolished the action — if it has.
In military law sources, enticement to desert is a discrete federal offense with a specific statutory lineage through the Revised Statutes. Bouvier's cites sections 1553, 1668, 5455, and 5525 of the Revised Statutes; researchers working with 19th-century federal military law should use those provisions as entry points, with awareness that the codification has since moved.
In child protection contexts, the term has undergone the most dramatic modern development. 20th- and 21st-century statutes have given enticement a heavily elaborated statutory meaning that the historical dictionaries do not anticipate. Researchers should treat the historical definitions as background only and anchor analysis in the operative statutory text.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are in agreement on the core definition — "to solicit, persuade, or procure" — which appears verbatim in Black's (1st ed.), Bouvier's, and Black's (2nd ed.). This formulaic consistency across sources suggests the phrase was a settled legal term of art by the late 19th century, not merely a descriptive gloss.
Black's 2nd edition adds case citations that give the definition jurisdictional grounding: Nash v. Douglass (New York), People v. Carrier (Michigan), and Gould v. State (Nebraska), indicating the definition was applied across multiple state courts. Bouvier's is the most substantively detailed, flagging both the federal military offense and the civil spousal enticement action with supporting case citations — making it the more useful starting point for historical research on either of those threads.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides only cross-references (ABDUCTION; HUSBAND), without a substantive entry, which is itself informative: it confirms that enticement was understood primarily through those related doctrines rather than as a standalone concept in that source's framework.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is the modern criminal enticement of children context, which would develop into a major area of statutory law in the 20th century. Researchers should not interpret the absence of this context in historical sources as evidence that the concept did not exist — early prosecutions proceeded under abduction, seduction, and corruption of minors statutes — but the consolidated "child enticement" framework is a modern development.
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Jurisdictional Note
The civil action for enticement of a spouse survives in a minority of U.S. states (including North Carolina, Mississippi, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Utah, among others) but has been abolished by statute or judicial decision in most jurisdictions. Child enticement statutes vary significantly in their elements, age thresholds, and penalty structures across state and federal systems; the federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 2422) sets a floor that states may exceed.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Enticement | Alienation of Affections | Child Exploitation Offenses | Tortious Interference with Contract
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