Definition
Entire means whole, undivided, and incapable of separation into distinct parts. In law the word does most of its work in contract doctrine, where it describes obligations that must be fully performed before any right to compensation accrues. An entire contract is one in which the parts are so interwoven that they cannot be treated independently — full performance is a condition precedent to the right to enforce the other side's obligation. The concept is contrasted throughout the common law with severable or apportionable contracts, in which partial performance earns proportional recovery.
The term also carries weight in procedural contexts. An entire claim arising from a single transaction must generally be brought at one time; splitting an entire cause of action is prohibited. And in property and family law, "entirety" appears in the doctrine of tenancy by the entireties, the form of joint ownership held between spouses as a unified legal person.
In modern corporate law, entire fairness is a standard of judicial review applied to conflicted transactions — particularly freeze-out mergers — where the usual deference of the business judgment rule is displaced and the court examines both the fairness of the process and the fairness of the price.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Whole; complete; lacking no part; also, in botany and mathematics, terms denoting unbroken continuity or complex-differentiability across all values.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Complete in all parts; undivided; undiminished; whole; full and perfect; also morally pure and faithful.
The common definitions track the legal ones more closely here than in many legal terms, but the legal application adds consequential force that plain usage omits. In contract law "entire" is not merely descriptive — it determines when and whether any right to payment vests at all. The ordinary speaker who says a job is "entire" means only that it is complete; the lawyer means that partial completion earns nothing.
Common Confusion
ENTIRE VS. SEVERABLE
The distinction between an entire contract and a severable (or divisible) contract is one of the most consequential classification problems in contract law. Whether a court characterizes a contract as entire or severable determines whether a party who performs only part of the bargain can recover anything. Courts have not always applied a single bright-line test; the inquiry turns on the parties' intent, the structure of the consideration, and whether price can be apportioned to distinct units of performance. Researchers should not assume that a lump-sum contract is automatically entire or that a contract with multiple deliverables is automatically severable.
Core Elements
For a contract to be characterized as entire rather than severable, courts historically examined:
1. UNITY OF CONSIDERATION — whether a single, indivisible consideration is exchanged for all promises, rather than a separate price attaching to each part.
2. INTERDEPENDENCE OF OBLIGATIONS — whether the parties' performances are so interlinked that partial performance by one side does not satisfy the bargain.
3. INTENT OF THE PARTIES — whether the parties manifestly treated the contract as a single whole or as a series of independent exchanges.
Why It Matters in Research
The word "entire" is a load-bearing term in several distinct bodies of doctrine and a researcher who encounters it in historical sources must identify which context applies before drawing conclusions.
In contract law, the entire/severable distinction governed recovery for partial performance across centuries of common-law development. Historical sources — including the sailor-voyage hypothetical that appears in Rapalje & Lawrence and echoes through dozens of American cases — illustrate the harsh common-law baseline: no recovery at all for partial performance of an entire contract. Equity and later doctrine (quasi-contract, quantum meruit, material breach analysis) softened this rule, so the rule stated in older dictionary entries reflects a stricter regime than modern courts apply. Researchers tracing a contract dispute across time should note when the softening doctrines entered the jurisdiction's case law.
In procedure, the rule against splitting an entire cause of action remains alive and significant. A plaintiff who holds an entire claim — one arising from a single transaction or occurrence — must bring it all at once or forfeit the remainder. This rule interacts with res judicata and claim preclusion; early cases framed it in terms of "entire" claims where modern sources use preclusion language.
In corporate law, the phrase entire fairness as a standard of review is modern usage with no direct counterpart in the historical dictionaries. The encyclopedia entry on freeze-out mergers addresses this doctrine specifically. Researchers working in the corporate context should not rely on the historical contract-law definitions when the relevant issue is the entire fairness standard applicable to conflicted transactions.
In property law, entirety (or entireties) is a term of art for the common-law marital estate. The historical dictionaries treat "entirete" as a distinct headword (Burrill cites Law French origin). The concept is addressed separately under tenancy by the entireties.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources agree on the core definition — entire means whole, undivided, incapable of separation — but differ in how much doctrinal texture they supply.
Black's First Edition states the definition in its most compressed form: "Whole; without division, separation, or diminution." The Second Edition entry retrieved in the source material is displaced (it covers entry in practice rather than the adjective entire), suggesting the term was treated as sufficiently defined by the first edition formulation.
Burrill adds the Law French derivation (entier) and the related term "entirete," noting it means "the whole; the entirety" with a cite to Kelham's glossary. This is the most etymologically oriented entry and is useful for locating the concept in medieval property sources.
Bouvier's entry goes straight to contract doctrine: "When a contract is entire, it must, in general, be fully performed before the party can claim the compensation which was to have been paid to him." Bouvier illustrates with the year-of-service scenario, and the entry is cut off mid-sentence but clearly tracked toward the consent-of-the-other-party exception.
Rapalje & Lawrence supply the clearest doctrinal contrast: entire versus severable or apportionable, illustrated by the sailor hypothetical. The executor-receives-nothing rule on a completed voyage was the standard common-law result for entire contracts and Rapalje's formulation is among the cleaner historical statements of the principle.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law adds the procedural dimension — "an entire claim arising out of one transaction, contract or tort, cannot be split" — and also lists synonyms: untouched, complete, unbroken, whole, undivided, indivisible, inseverable. Anderson cross-references SEPARABLE, which is the correct paired lookup.
No historical source addresses the entire fairness standard in corporate law; that usage is entirely modern and must be researched through case law and corporate treatises rather than these dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The entire/severable distinction is a common-law doctrine recognized across American jurisdictions but applied with varying emphasis. Some states have substantially displaced the all-or-nothing consequence through liberal quantum meruit recovery; others retain the traditional rule more firmly in commercial contexts. The rule against splitting an entire cause of action is procedural and its scope varies with state claim-preclusion doctrine.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Mergers and Acquisitions — Freeze-Out Mergers and Entire Fairness (The Law Mind Business Organizations & Corporate Law Encyclopedia)