Definition
Entrusion is an archaic and variant spelling of intrusion, used in early English legal writing. The term carries no independent legal meaning and functions solely as an orthographic alternative that appears in older texts. For substantive meaning, see INTRUSION.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance of this entry is paleographic and indexing-related. Researchers working with early modern English legal manuscripts, abridgments, or printed compilations may encounter "entrusion" where a modern source would render "intrusion." Failure to recognize the equivalence can cause a researcher to miss relevant material or to treat the variant as a distinct legal concept when it is not.
Burrill flags the term specifically because it appears in Cowell's legal dictionary — meaning it entered at least one influential reference work and could recur in sources that drew on Cowell. Any corpus search for intrusion-related doctrine in pre-eighteenth-century English legal sources should include "entrusion" as an alternate search string.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary (the sole historical source for this entry) is explicit and brief: entrusion is "an old form of intrusion, used by Cowell." John Cowell's Interpreter (1607) was a widely cited early legal dictionary, and variant spellings in that era were common — English legal orthography was not standardized, and the same substantive term could appear in multiple forms across different printers, copyists, and authorities. Burrill's decision to include the entry rather than omit it reflects sound lexicographic practice: a researcher encountering the word in a primary source needed confirmation that it was not a distinct term of art.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus independently defines entrusion, which reinforces that it was understood as a spelling variant rather than a concept warranting separate treatment.