Definition
A felony is a serious criminal offense, distinguished from lesser offenses (misdemeanors and infractions) by the severity of the punishment authorized and the legal consequences that attach upon conviction. The precise definition varies by legal system and era.
In modern United States federal law, a felony is any offense punishable by imprisonment for more than one year or by death. Most states follow this threshold. The classification determines not only potential sentence length but also collateral consequences: loss of voting rights, disqualification from jury service, firearms disabilities, deportation exposure for non-citizens, and professional licensing bars.
At English common law, a felony was any crime upon conviction for which the offender forfeited lands and goods to the Crown, in addition to whatever corporal or capital punishment the offense carried. The forfeiture consequence — not the gravity of the act — defined the category. Over time, as the catalog of forfeiture-triggering offenses expanded to include murder, robbery, rape, arson, burglary, and larceny, the word came to describe those offenses themselves rather than just the legal consequence.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A serious criminal offense punishable under U.S. federal law by imprisonment of not less than one year or by the death penalty in the most serious offenses.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An offense which occasions a total forfeiture of either lands or goods, or both, at common law, and to which capital or other punishment may be added according to the degree of guilt; a heinous crime; especially, a crime punishable by death or imprisonment.
The modern common understanding has largely converged with modern law — a felony is simply a serious crime. The historical legal definition, however, was structural rather than intuitive: the category was defined by forfeiture consequences, not by the severity of the underlying act. Webster's 1913 captures the transitional moment when both meanings coexisted.
Common Confusion
FELONY VS. CRIME INVOLVING MORAL TURPITUDE
Immigration law, professional licensing, and some civil contexts use "crime involving moral turpitude" as a separate and distinct classification that overlaps with but does not map onto the felony/misdemeanor line. A misdemeanor can constitute a crime involving moral turpitude; not every felony does.
Why It Matters in Research
The word "felony" is a trap for researchers who assume definitional stability. Three distinct meanings appear in the Law Mind corpus, depending on the source's era and jurisdiction:
First, the feudal and common-law meaning: forfeiture-based. A felony was defined by the civil consequence of land and goods reverting to the Crown or lord. Burrill's entry derives the word from the feudal fee itself — the offense cost the vassal his fee. This meaning is operative in pre-nineteenth-century English sources and in early American cases citing English authority.
Second, the transitional English meaning: After the Forfeiture Act of 1870 abolished forfeiture as a consequence of conviction, the forfeiture-based rationale for the felony category disappeared in England. Bouvier's notes that "the essential distinction between felony and misdemeanor is lost in England since the Felony Act of 1870." English sources from this period forward use felony as a historical label, not a functional one. Researchers citing Victorian or later English criminal law materials should not assume the term carries operative legal weight.
Third, the modern American meaning: statutory and sentence-length-based. Federal law (18 U.S.C. § 3559) defines felonies by imprisonment term. State classifications vary — some states use the one-year threshold, others use distinct statutory felony classifications regardless of sentence imposed. This is the meaning operative in contemporary American sources.
Navigational intelligence for corpus users: When a historical source uses "felony" as a category, pause to determine whether the author is invoking the forfeiture-based English meaning or a statutory American classification. The two do not always coincide. Additionally, the collateral consequences of felony conviction — disenfranchisement, firearms disabilities, professional bars — are addressed in separate Encyclopedia entries and vary substantially by jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the common-law English definition but illuminate it from different angles.
Burrill traces the term to feudal origins with unusual precision, deriving it from the Saxon feh (fee or fief) and lon (price or value), rendering felony as literally "the cost of one's fee" — the act by which a vassal forfeited his tenure. This etymological framing makes the definition structural: felony was not primarily about the nature of the offense but about its tenurial consequence.
Bouvier's provides the most complete common-law formulation: "An offence which occasions a total forfeiture of either lands or goods, or both, at common law, to which capital or other punishment may be superadded, according to the degree of guilt," citing Blackstone's Commentaries, Hawkins' Pleas of the Crown, and Coke on Littleton. Bouvier's also separately addresses the felon's identity and the power of private persons to arrest a felon — reflecting the common-law rule that felony status triggered special procedural consequences beyond mere punishment.
Black's (both editions) follows Bouvier's framework closely, tracking the English definition through forfeiture and noting the American transformation: in the United States, felony is defined by statute, and because forfeiture was not universally adopted, the American definition rests instead on the nature and degree of punishment — particularly imprisonment in a state penitentiary or for a term exceeding one year.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is minimal, offering only a citation to a case defining "felon" without elaborating the category itself — a reminder that not all shelf sources are equally useful for a given term.
The historical sources collectively miss the post-1870 English collapse of the distinction and say nothing about the collateral-consequences regime that defines the practical significance of felony classification in modern American law.
Jurisdictional Note
In England and Wales, the felony/misdemeanor distinction was formally abolished by the Criminal Law Act 1967, which replaced it with categories of "arrestable" and "non-arrestable" offenses (later further revised). In the United States, the one-year imprisonment threshold is the dominant federal and state standard, but several states use multi-tier classification systems (e.g., Class A through Class E felonies) with different sentence ranges at each level. A small number of states retain a different structural approach. Collateral consequences of felony conviction — voting rights restoration, record sealing, firearms restoration — vary dramatically by state.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
DUI — Aggravated and Felony DUI (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
Felony Disenfranchisement and Restoration of Rights (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
Homicide — Felony Murder Rule (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)