Definition
FEATHER does not function as a standalone legal term of art in the common law tradition. The entry attributed to this heading in the source material is a misprint or OCR error: the historical dictionary text reproduced under "FEATHER" in Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) is plainly the entry for FATHER — describing the male parent, putative fathers, stepfathers, adoptive fathers, and the limits of the term relative to "parent." The word "Father" rendered as "Feather" is a typographic artifact, not a distinct legal concept.
Researchers encountering this entry in digitized or scanned versions of Black's 2nd Edition should treat it as FATHER and consult that entry accordingly.
FATHER (the intended term): The male parent; the man by whom a child is begotten. In legal usage, the term may extend beyond the biological father to include:
1. Putative father — a man alleged or presumed to be the biological father of a child born outside of marriage, where paternity has not been legally established.
2. Legal father — a man recognized by law as the father of a child, whether through marriage, acknowledgment, adjudication, or adoption.
3. Stepfather — the husband of a child's mother, where he is not the biological or adoptive father.
4. Adoptive father — a man who has assumed parental rights and responsibilities through legal adoption.
The term is narrower than "parent," which can encompass female parents, and cannot be construed to include a mother or other female guardian.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A branching, hair-like structure that grows on the bodies of birds, used for flight, swimming, protection, and display; also, long hair on the lower legs of certain dog and horse breeds; one of the fins on an arrow shaft.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One of the peculiar dermal appendages belonging to birds, including contour feathers, quills, and down; also used figuratively for kind, nature, or species (from the phrase "birds of a feather").
The word "feather" carries no legal meaning whatsoever. Its appearance as a dictionary headword here is entirely the result of a scanning or transcription error corrupting the word "father." No legal doctrine, statute, or common law principle attaches to the word "feather" itself.
Common Confusion
The corruption of FATHER into FEATHER is a known hazard in OCR-processed legal texts, particularly 19th- and early 20th-century law dictionaries scanned at low resolution. Researchers using keyword searches in digitized legal databases may fail to retrieve relevant FATHER entries if the source text has been similarly corrupted, or may retrieve false hits under "feather" that belong to parentage and family law doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is as a caution about source reliability in digitized historical legal materials. Black's Law Dictionary, 2nd Edition (1910) is a heavily digitized text that appears across multiple repositories — some derived from scans of varying quality. OCR errors of this kind (a single-letter substitution, "t" misread as "e" or the full word corrupted) can silently misdirect research in at least two ways:
First, a researcher searching for the legal definition of "father" in a corrupted digital copy may not find the entry at all, or may find it only under an unexpected headword.
Second, a researcher doing corpus-wide keyword analysis across historical legal texts may generate false positives — attributing legal significance to "feather" where none exists — or miss genuine paternity and parentage doctrine indexed under the corrupted form.
When working with scanned editions of Black's 2nd, always cross-check against a clean text or facsimile when a definition seems anomalous or the headword appears inconsistent with the definition text that follows. The Law Mind corpus may contain additional instances of this category of error in other entries.
For substantive legal content on the intended term, see FATHER, PATERNITY, PUTATIVE FATHER, and PARENT in this dictionary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) intended to define FATHER as: "The male parent. He by whom a child is begotten." The entry goes on to note that the term may, depending on context and the nature of the instrument, include a putative father, a stepfather, an adoptive father, or a grandfather — but that it is not as broad as "parent" and cannot be read to include a female. The cited authorities (Lind v. Burke, 56 Neb. 785, 77 N.W. 444; Crook v. Webb, 125 Ala.) support these propositions on the scope of the term in statutory construction.
No historical legal dictionary assigns any legal meaning to "feather."