Definition
A giver is a person who makes a gift — that is, a voluntary transfer of property to another without consideration. The term is functionally synonymous with donor in most legal contexts and appears most often in older legal texts discussing the law of gifts and conveyances.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who gives; a donor or contributor.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who gives; a donor; a bestower; a grantor; one who imparts or distributes.
The gap between common and legal meaning is minimal. The ordinary word and the legal term are essentially identical in meaning, which likely accounts for why GIVER faded from legal usage — donor, a Latin-derived term, came to feel more precisely legal, while giver retained its everyday register. The only meaningful distinction is that the legal term carries the technical doctrine of implied irrevocability, which the common usage does not.
Why It Matters in Research
GIVER is largely an archaic term in modern legal writing. Researchers encountering it in historical documents, deeds, or older treatises should treat it as equivalent to donor. The term appears with some frequency in older equity and property sources but has been almost entirely displaced by donor in contemporary usage.
The more substantive research implication lies in Bouvier's gloss: the giver "always impliedly agrees with the donee that he will not revoke the gift." This implied irrevocability principle is embedded in the classical law of gifts and matters when researching disputes over whether a transfer was completed or remained revocable. Researchers tracing this doctrine should look not just under GIVER but under GIFT, DELIVERY, and REVOCATION — the operative concepts where the doctrine is developed.
Historical sources that use GIVER in the context of fee tail conveyances (as in "donor and donee" under De Donis Conditionalibus) employ the term in a narrower, feudal land-law sense. In that context, the giver's intent controlled the descent of the entailed estate. Researchers working with medieval or early modern land records should be alert to this specialized usage, which is distinct from the broader gift law meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree entirely on the core definition: a giver is a donor, one who makes a gift. Black's (both editions) offers the definition without elaboration. Bouvier alone adds the implied-irrevocability principle — that by making the gift, the giver implicitly agrees not to revoke it. This is consistent with settled gift law requiring delivery and donative intent to complete a gift, after which the donor's power of revocation is extinguished. Bouvier's formulation is useful precisely because it points toward the legal consequence of the act, not just its description.
None of the historical dictionaries address the feudal land-law usage, though that context would have been well understood by the intended readership of the period.