GUAGE

3 definitions found across Law Mind sources

GUAGEAuthored
The Law Mind • 434 words
Definition
Guage is a misspelling of GAUGE. See GAUGE for the substantive legal definition concerning railway track width and related measurement standards. Note on the Rapalje & Lawrence entry: The historical dictionary entry under this headword contains two unrelated definitions spliced together — one for the railway measurement sense of gauge, and one (mid-sentence, beginning with definition "2.") that belongs to the entry for GUARANTY, describing the guarantor, guarantee, and principal. This appears to be a typographical or editorial error in the original source, likely a printer's conflation of adjacent entries. Neither definition is native to the misspelled headword "guage." ---
Common Confusion
GUAGE / GAUGE: Guage is simply a misspelling. No legal distinction exists between the two forms. All substantive content belongs under GAUGE. GAUGE (railway) / GUARANTY: These are entirely unrelated legal concepts joined by a printer's error in Rapalje & Lawrence. The guaranty language in the Rapalje & Lawrence "guage" entry describes the legal relationship among guarantor, guarantee, and principal — a topic with no connection to railway measurement standards. ---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers consulting Rapalje & Lawrence must be alert to a specific anomaly at this entry. The garbled text — which begins with railway gauge and pivots without transition into guaranty terminology — is a source-level error, not a legitimate compound definition. A researcher who encounters this entry in a historical corpus search should not treat the guaranty language as bearing any relationship to gauge law or railway measurement. Cross-check against the GAUGE and GUARANTY entries separately. Optical character recognition (OCR) and keyword indexing of historical legal dictionaries will surface this entry in searches for both "gauge" and "guaranty." Neither result is reliable without manual verification against the original text. The misspelling itself is common enough in historical manuscripts, pleadings, and railway contracts that corpus searches on gauge-related legal questions should include variant spellings to avoid missed hits. ---
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only source dictionary for this entry. The entry is corrupt: it appears to merge the tail end of a gauge definition (railway track width, fixed at 4 feet 8 inches in Great Britain and America, 5 feet 3 inches in Ireland) with the opening of a guaranty definition (the tripartite relationship of guarantor, guarantee, and principal). This is an editorial artifact, not substantive legal content. No weight should be given to either definition as appearing under this headword; researchers should consult the correct headwords directly. ---
Related Terms
GAUGE | GUARANTY | GUARANTOR | SURETY | PRINCIPAL
GUAGEmain
Rapalje & Lawrence • 1888
The measure of width of a railway, fixed, with some exceptions, at 4 feet 8 inches in Great Britain and America, and 5 feet 3 inches in Ireland. 2. The person who binds himself by the guaranty is called the guarantor or the surety, the person to whom it is made the guarantee, and the person for whom it is made is called the principal. Thus, if A. agrees to supply goods to B., in consideration of C.'s promise to pay him for them if B. fails to do so, this is a contract of guaranty by C., who is the guarantor or surety, A. being the guarantee and B. the principal. 3. Under the various statutes of frauds, every guaranty must be in writing and signed by the party to be charged, but the consideration need not, as a general rule, be stated. 24. Continuing.-A continuing guaranty is one which continues in force until recalled by the guarantor, as opposed to a guaranty applying only to a particular act, sum or transaction; thus, a guaranty "for any goods which A. may supply B. with, to the amount of $100," is a continuing guaranty, and is, therefore, not discharged by one transaction, i. e. by a supply of goods to the amount stated and a payment for them. Chit. Cont. 490; Sm. Merc. Law 470. As to the important dis-
guagenoun
Wiktionary (English) • 2026
Wiktionary contributorsCC BY-SA 4.0 • via Kaikki
Extracted and formatted for display by Law Mind. Source link opens the current Wiktionary page and its contributor history; it is not a frozen copy of this extract.
Misspelling of gauge.

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