Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "hour" or, in a secondary sense, "now" or "the present time." Appearing in early English legal records and pleadings written in Law French, HORE functioned as a temporal marker — either designating the specific hour of a transaction, court proceeding, or act, or signaling the present moment as distinguished from a past or future one. It carries no independent substantive legal meaning and functions solely as a particle of legal French employed in formal written instruments and court records.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No current English entry for "hore" as a standalone word. The form is obsolete.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Listed simply as an obsolete form of "hoar" (an adjective meaning white or gray with age), citing Chaucer.
The Webster's entry and the legal entry describe entirely unrelated words that happen to share a spelling. The legal term HORE derives from Law French and means "hour" or "now"; the Webster's form is a Middle English adjective of Old English origin meaning aged whiteness. A researcher encountering "hore" in a historical legal document should not import any English-language meaning into the term.
Common Confusion
HORE and ORE are closely related Law French temporal terms and Burrill's entry cross-references them directly. ORE (also spelled OR) is the more commonly encountered form in legal records, carrying the same sense of "now" or "at this time" — as in the familiar pleading formula ore tenus (by word of mouth, at this time). Researchers may encounter both forms in manuscript records and should treat them as functional equivalents in context. Neither term should be confused with the English word "hour" in its modern sense; the Law French usage was formulaic rather than clock-specific.
Why It Matters in Research
HORE is a paleographic and linguistic trap for researchers working with early English legal manuscripts, plea rolls, or Year Books written in Law French. Its primary research significance is identificational: knowing the term prevents misreading or mistranscription of a common temporal marker as a meaningful legal term of art.
Several practical points bear noting. First, Law French orthography was inconsistent across scribes and periods; researchers may encounter variant spellings including "heure," "ore," "or," and "hore" performing identical functions within the same document corpus. Second, Burrill's cross-reference to ORE is the more productive research path — ORE appears far more frequently in indexed legal sources and secondary literature. Third, researchers using full-text search tools against digitized legal manuscripts should treat HORE as a variant to include in search strings alongside OR and ORE when hunting for temporal pleading language. Fourth, the term has no meaningful jurisdictional or doctrinal evolution; it is a linguistic fossil, not a legal concept that changed over time.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive treatment among the standard historical legal dictionaries. The entry is minimal — two definitions (hour; now/the present time), each sourced to Kelham's dictionary of Law French — and directs the reader to ORE for fuller treatment. No other major historical legal dictionary (Bouvier, Black's early editions, Tomlin's) carries a dedicated entry for HORE, which reflects the term's status as a linguistic unit rather than a legal concept warranting doctrinal exposition. Kelham's Normand Dictionary (1779), referenced by Burrill, remains the primary authority for Law French legal vocabulary of this type and is the appropriate terminus for researchers who need to go deeper into the term's linguistic context.