Definition
In land law, a small, irregular piece of land — typically triangular or wedge-shaped — left over when adjoining surveys do not close or align perfectly. Gores arise from surveying imprecision, overlapping grants, or the geometry of boundary lines that fail to meet. The term carries two overlapping uses:
1. Old English law: A small, narrow slip of ground. The earliest uses referred to a sliver of land, often of uncertain ownership, lying between neighboring parcels.
2. Modern land law: A small triangular piece of land remaining between surveys that do not close — commonly arising in metes-and-bounds surveying when bearings and distances, when run out, fail to return to the point of beginning.
3. New England subdivision usage: In Maine, Vermont, and certain other New England states, a gore is a recognized subdivision of a county — a geographically defined area with too sparse a population to be organized and incorporated as a town. These gores persist as administrative units of state government.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Blood, especially thickened or clotted blood from a wound; carnage, bloodshed, violence; dirt or filth.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Blood; especially, blood that after effusion has become thick or clotted."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is total. In ordinary English, gore means blood or violence — a meaning with no overlap whatsoever with the legal term. Researchers encountering the word in a legal or land-records context should not allow the common meaning to create any ambiguity: the legal term refers exclusively to land, not to injury or death.
Common Confusion
Gore is sometimes conflated with gair, gare, or similar dialectal terms for strips of land, and may be confused with a gore in highway law (a triangular island or median strip). In New England administrative usage, gores are occasionally mistaken for unorganized territories or plantations, which are distinct categories with different legal characteristics. Separately, Burrill's dictionary entry for GORS (a pool or confined water used for fish) appears immediately adjacent to GORE in older sources and belongs to an entirely different legal context — the two terms are unrelated despite their proximity in historical dictionaries.
Why It Matters in Research
The term's meaning shifts depending on era and jurisdiction, and researchers must identify which sense applies before consulting relevant sources.
In title and deed research, gores represent a classic problem of gap parcels — land not expressly conveyed by any deed in a chain of title. Whether a grantor intended to convey a gore lying between described parcels has generated substantial case law, particularly in states with heavy metes-and-bounds surveying histories. When a deed conveys land "to the line" of an adjoining tract, courts have divided on whether the grantor's title to an adjoining gore passes by implication or is retained. This question is central to quiet title actions and boundary disputes.
In New England, the administrative gore creates a distinct research problem. Vital records, property records, and tax records for lands within a gore may be held by the county rather than a town clerk, or may have been transferred when adjacent towns were organized or boundaries redrawn. Researchers tracing land or genealogical records in Maine or Vermont should confirm whether a location was ever within a gore and, if so, where records were deposited.
The surveying sense of gore also appears in public land states in the context of the U.S. General Land Office surveys, where closing errors in township surveys created gore strips — sometimes called "fractional sections" — that required special handling under public land law.
Corpus researchers should note that the term appears sporadically and inconsistently in historical materials. Colonial and early republic sources may use gore interchangeably with slip, strip, or surplus, making keyword searches unreliable without variant searching.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a small, narrow slip of ground. Cowell's Interpreter is cited by both Black's (1st Ed.) and Burrill as the primary authority for the old English sense, and Kennett's Parochial Antiquities is added by Burrill as an additional source. None of the historical dictionaries disagrees on the fundamental meaning.
Black's 2nd Edition meaningfully expands on the 1st Edition by adding two things: the triangular geometry associated with survey closures, and the New England administrative subdivision usage. The 1st Edition's bare entry — "a small, narrow slip of ground" — gives researchers almost nothing to work with for modern land law questions. The 2nd Edition's expansion reflects the term's genuine practical importance in American surveying and local government law.
Burrill includes an adjacent entry for GORS (a pool or water enclosure for fish), drawn from Domesday, Spelman, and Coke. Though Burrill presents these as separate entries, their proximity has occasionally caused confusion in older secondary sources. They are linguistically and legally distinct terms.
None of the historical dictionaries addresses the public land survey system dimension of the term, which developed after their principal periods of compilation. Researchers working with federal land grant records and GLO survey materials will need to supplement historical dictionary sources with surveying and public land law references.
Jurisdictional Note
The New England administrative sense of gore (an unincorporated county subdivision) is essentially limited to Maine and Vermont, with historical traces in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In metes-and-bounds states generally, gore as a gap parcel is a recognized concept in title law. In the public land survey states of the Midwest and West, analogous parcels arise from closing errors in the rectangular survey system and are treated under federal land law frameworks rather than the common law gore doctrine.