Definition
An archaic Law French verb meaning "to enter." Used in medieval legal texts to denote the act of entering — whether entering land, entering a plea, or making a formal entry of record. The term is the Law French equivalent of the Latin INTRARE and the anglicized ENTER. It appears in variant conjugated forms in early sources: ENTRAST (enters, third person) and ENTRANT (entering, present participle).
ENTRER has no independent modern legal life. It survives only in historical sources and as a philological anchor for understanding how Norman French legal vocabulary shaped the English common law lexicon.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Entrer" is a standard French verb meaning "to enter" or "to go in." It remains in active, everyday use in modern French.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not list "entrer" as an English word; the anglicized form "enter" carries that definition — to go or come into a place.
The gap here is one of register rather than meaning: the legal meaning of ENTRER is not substantively different from the ordinary meaning of "enter," but the term itself signals a technical legal context. Encountering ENTRER in a manuscript or printed source is a marker that the document is written in Law French, which carries specific interpretive implications for dating, jurisdiction, and authority.
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Why It Matters in Research
ENTRER is primarily a philological signpost. A researcher who encounters it in a source is almost certainly reading a text in Law French — the Anglo-Norman legal dialect used in English courts from roughly the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Recognizing this shapes how the surrounding material should be read and contextualized.
Burrill attributes the usage to Britton (c. 114), a late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise written in Law French and attributed to the reign of Edward I. Britton is one of the foundational texts of early English common law, and passages citing ENTRER, ENTRAST, or ENTRANT in that work concern the law of entry — a doctrinally significant area touching on possession, disseisin, and real property remedies.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should be alert to the following:
First, Law French terms like ENTRER were not always consistently rendered. Spelling variants are common across manuscripts and printed editions; a researcher should not assume that the absence of a specific spelling forecloses the presence of the concept.
Second, the underlying concept — the act of entry upon land — carries substantial legal weight. The "entry" that ENTRER describes in early sources is tied to real property doctrine: entry as the self-help remedy for a disseised freeholder, and the procedural forms of action (writs of entry) that developed around it. The word in its verb form points toward those doctrines without itself being the technical term for them.
Third, because ENTRER appears in a Law French context, any translation into English for citation or quotation purposes should be handled carefully. Early printed editions of Britton and similar texts often contain facing-page translations or editorial glosses of varying quality and era.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source available for this entry, and its treatment is brief: ENTRER is identified as Law French, derived from the Latin INTRARE, glossed as "to enter," and attributed to Britton. The conjugated forms ENTRAST and ENTRANT are noted without extended discussion.
No elaboration of legal doctrine accompanies the entry in Burrill. This is consistent with Burrill's general practice for Law French vocabulary — he records the term and its source but treats the substantive law under anglicized or Latin headings (ENTRY, INTRARE). Researchers should therefore treat ENTRER as a cross-reference term and follow the chain to ENTRY and INTRARE for doctrinal content.
Other major historical dictionaries — Bouvier, Black's early editions, Jacob's Law Dictionary — do not appear to carry ENTRER as a headword, reflecting the term's status as a linguistic relic rather than an operative legal concept by the time those works were compiled.
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Jurisdictional Note
ENTRER as a term is specific to the English common law tradition and its Law French inheritance. It has no analogue in American legal usage except as a historical artifact. Civil law jurisdictions did not use Law French and would not have encountered this term in their legal sources.
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