Definition
Incapable of being placed out or hired. The term describes a person or thing that cannot be let for service, leased, or otherwise placed in employment or tenancy. It appears in civil and ecclesiastical law contexts to describe a status or condition that disqualifies placement or hire.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not able to be located, as in space.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry recorded.
The gap here is significant. The ordinary modern sense of "illocable" suggests something that cannot be physically found or spatially located — a meaning entirely unrelated to its legal sense. A researcher encountering this term in a legal document who relies on general dictionary intuition will misread the passage entirely. In law, illocable has nothing to do with location in space; it concerns legal capacity to be placed out, hired, or let.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a rare term of art encountered almost exclusively in older civil law, ecclesiastical law, and treatise literature. Researchers are unlikely to find it in modern statutory codes or contemporary case law. Its appearance in a source almost certainly signals pre-twentieth-century material, and often specifically signals canon law or Roman law influence, where rules about who could be placed in service or what property could be let were formally codified.
The principal trap is the false cognate problem noted above: the modern ordinary meaning of "illocable" (spatially unlocatable) will actively mislead a researcher who does not recognize the term as legal vocabulary. In historical corpus searching, queries built around placement, hire, or service incapacity will be more productive than spatial or positional searches.
Researchers working in ecclesiastical records, colonial apprenticeship materials, or Roman-derived property law should flag this term when it appears attached to persons, as it may indicate a legal disability affecting the subject's capacity to enter service arrangements. When attached to property, it signals that the property could not be leased or let — a distinction with consequences for tenure and inheritance analysis.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree precisely on the core definition: incapable of being placed out or hired. Bouvier frames it as incapable of being "let out or hired," Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence use near-identical language, with only minor typographic variation across editions (Black's 2nd ed. renders "out" as "eut," an evident typesetting error).
None of the historical dictionaries provides a use example, contextual elaboration, or citation to authority — a notable absence that reflects the term's narrow, specialized circulation. Rapalje & Lawrence follows the entry immediately with "ILLUD," the Latin demonstrative pronoun, confirming that illocable appears in the dictionaries primarily as a transitional vocabulary entry rather than a term requiring extended treatment. This sparseness is itself informative: the compilers treated illocable as sufficiently self-evident within its specialized context to require no further gloss.
What the historical sources do not address: they give no guidance on which legal systems deployed the term most actively, whether it applied equally to persons and property, or what legal consequences attached to the status. Researchers needing that depth must move beyond the dictionary shelf to treatises in Roman law, canon law, and early modern civil law.
Jurisdictional Note
The term appears to derive from civil and ecclesiastical law traditions and is not a term of art in common law systems generally. It is unlikely to appear in American or English statutory material after the mid-nineteenth century and should be treated as a marker of civilian or canonical source influence when encountered in any jurisdiction.