Definition
A Latin term meaning "we incorporate." In English legal history, incorporamus was one of the operative words used in a royal charter or letters patent by which the Crown formally created a corporation. Its appearance in a granting instrument signaled the sovereign act of legal incorporation — the moment at which a collection of persons or an institution was recognized as a body politic with perpetual succession, the capacity to sue and be sued, and the other incidents of corporate existence.
The word functioned as a performative term: its utterance (or inscription) in the appropriate instrument did not merely describe an act of incorporation but constituted it. Like other words of grant in formal legal instruments, the precise language mattered. Incorporamus was among the recognized forms that courts and commentators treated as sufficient to accomplish the act.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-modern English corporate charters — particularly those granted by the Crown to municipalities, guilds, trading companies, or ecclesiastical bodies — will encounter incorporamus as a technical marker identifying the operative clause of incorporation. Its presence in a document is strong evidence that the instrument was intended as a constitutive act, not merely a confirmatory or regulatory grant.
The term is historically specific to English practice and is unlikely to appear in American legal instruments, where corporate creation moved quickly toward statutory forms following independence. A researcher tracing the origins of a particular corporation's legal existence may need to locate the original charter language; finding incorporamus (or its near equivalents) is the signal that the granting clause has been reached.
Because the word drops out of active legal vocabulary with the rise of general incorporation statutes in the nineteenth century, it will appear almost exclusively in primary sources and commentary predating that transition. Historical dictionaries and treatises covering English corporation law are the natural reference points; modern American legal dictionaries often omit the term entirely or mention it only in passing.
The corpus connections run through Blackstone and Stephen — both cited consistently across all three source dictionaries — making those treatises the authoritative secondary sources for understanding the term's role in English corporate formation practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Burrill's — agree closely on substance: incorporamus is the first-person plural Latin for "we incorporate" and was one of the operative words of corporate creation in England, with every entry citing Blackstone's Commentaries (Book I) and Stephen's Commentaries (Volume III) as authority.
Burrill adds the useful etymological note tracing the word to incorporare and cross-references that headword, suggesting that researchers working in his dictionary should read the two entries together for a fuller treatment of the concept. The Black's entries are functionally identical across editions, with the second edition's entry reflecting only minor typographical artifacts of reproduction.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the broader doctrinal question of whether incorporamus was strictly required or merely customary, whether synonymous Latin phrases could substitute, and how courts resolved disputes over defective or ambiguous charter language. For those questions, the treatises cited — Blackstone and Stephen — are the necessary next stop.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs almost exclusively to English legal history. American corporate law developed through colonial charters and then rapidly through general incorporation statutes; the specific Latin operative words of royal charters were not transplanted into American practice as terms of art.