Definition
A person who is not a citizen or subject of the state or country under consideration; broadly, one who owes allegiance to a foreign sovereign. The term carries two distinct senses depending on context and era:
1. In American law: A person born outside the United States who owes allegiance to a foreign state. Equivalent to alien. A person who acquires citizenship ceases to be a foreigner in this sense.
2. In old English law: A person who was not an inhabitant of a particular city or borough — regardless of national origin. A subject of the English Crown could be a "foreigner" with respect to the city of London if not enrolled as a citizen or freeman of that city.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person from a foreign country. Also, in trade slang, a private job done by an employee on employer premises for personal benefit.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A person belonging to or owing allegiance to a foreign country; one not native in the country or jurisdiction under consideration; an alien; a stranger.
The common and legal meanings largely overlap in modern usage, but the gap matters in historical research. The old English municipal sense — where "foreigner" meant anyone outside the city's civic community, not outside the nation — has no equivalent in ordinary English usage today and no longer appears in American legal usage at all. A researcher encountering "foreigner" in a pre-nineteenth-century English source should not assume the word means what it means now.
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Common Confusion
FOREIGNER vs. ALIEN: In American legal usage, the two terms are functionally synonymous — both denote a person owing allegiance to a foreign state. But "alien" has retained precise technical standing in immigration and nationality law, where it carries formal statutory definitions and subdivisions (resident alien, nonresident alien, enemy alien, etc.). "Foreigner" has largely receded from American statutory drafting and is now the informal or literary term. Researchers should not assume that historical sources using "foreigner" intended the same legal precision as modern sources using "alien."
FOREIGNER vs. STRANGER: In old English municipal law, "stranger" and "foreigner" were sometimes used interchangeably to denote non-inhabitants of a city or guild. In other contexts, "stranger" had broader application. The terms are not reliably synonymous across sources or periods.
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Why It Matters in Research
The municipal sense creates a genuine trap. In English sources from roughly the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries, a court or guild record referring to a "foreigner" may mean nothing more than a person from outside the city — a subject of the Crown, perhaps born ten miles away, with no connection to any foreign nation. Reading the modern meaning back into such sources produces serious misunderstanding. Burrill's note citing Hargrave's Law Tracts for the proposition that "foreigner" denoted non-inhabitants of a city is a useful anchor for this usage.
In American sources, the term appears most prominently in early nineteenth-century case law where courts were working out the relationship between citizenship, alienage, and access to courts. The shift from "foreigner" to "alien" as the dominant legal term tracks the development of federal immigration and naturalization law; by the time immigration statutes became detailed and comprehensive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "alien" was the term of art and "foreigner" had retreated to general usage.
For family law researchers, the distinction between "foreigner" and "alien" can affect how historical marriage-recognition cases are framed. Older cases discussing marriages contracted by or with "foreigners" may be using the term in a non-technical sense that does not map neatly onto modern alien/citizen classifications.
The corpus connections here run primarily toward alien, citizenship, and naturalization entries, and toward the family law materials on recognition of foreign marriages.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four historical dictionaries agree on the core structure: a bifurcated term with a municipal English sense and a broader national sense. Black's (both editions) and Black's 2nd lead with the old English municipal usage before pivoting to the later meaning. Bouvier and Burrill treat the municipal sense as secondary or historical and foreground the American equivalence with "alien."
Burrill is the most precise on American usage, quoting Chief Justice Marshall's statement in 1 Peters that "a foreigner who becomes a citizen is no longer a foreigner" — a formulation that confirms the term's functional identity with alienage in early American jurisprudence and underscores that naturalization extinguishes the status entirely.
None of the historical dictionaries address the complete disappearance of "foreigner" from modern statutory drafting, nor do they anticipate the degree to which "alien" would become the controlling term of art in federal immigration law. Researchers relying solely on historical dictionaries for this term will find the American law treatment accurate as far as it goes but incomplete for understanding how the term's legal significance faded over the twentieth century.
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Jurisdictional Note
In American law, "foreigner" and "alien" have been used interchangeably, but federal statutes governing immigration, naturalization, and taxation consistently use "alien" rather than "foreigner." State court decisions, particularly older ones, may use "foreigner" loosely. In English law, the municipal sense persisted in guild and civic contexts well into the modern period.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
family_10: Marriage — Recognition of Foreign and Interstate Marriages (The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia)
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