Definition
A Latin term from the civil and common law meaning increase or improvement. In legal contexts, incrementum refers to growth, addition, or augmentation — most commonly applied to land, estates, or the value thereof. It stands in direct opposition to decrementum, which denotes decrease or abatement. The term appears primarily in older English legal writing and pleading, particularly in connection with property, tidal and riparian land, and ecclesiastical matters.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Incrementum" has no standard entry in modern general English dictionaries; it is a Latin word meaning increase or growth, familiar mainly in academic and scientific contexts (as in "increment").
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's recognizes "increment" as the English derivative, defined as "the act or process of increasing; growth in bulk, guantity, number, value, or amount; augmentation."
The legal term incrementum is more specific than its English cognate suggests. In law, it carries technical weight as the counterpart to decrementum in a paired opposition — especially relevant to questions of whether land, rents, or other property have grown or diminished. A researcher encountering "increment" in a modern context should not assume the Latin incrementum in an older source carries the same generalized meaning.
Common Confusion
Incrementum is sometimes encountered near discussions of alluvion and accretion — the gradual addition of land by natural forces — but the terms are not synonymous. Incrementum is the broader Latin term for any legal increase or improvement; accretion and alluvion are specific doctrines governing how land grows by deposit of soil. Similarly, researchers should not conflate incrementum with the English legal phrase "increase of costs" (also sometimes called incrementum in older pleading), which refers to the court's augmentation of costs awarded beyond those taxed by the master or prothonotary.
Why It Matters in Research
Incrementum appears most frequently in pre-nineteenth-century English legal sources — Year Books, early Chancery records, and ecclesiastical court materials — and is rarely used in American legal writing except as a direct quotation from or citation to those older authorities. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should be alert to two practical traps.
First, the term functions as part of a formal pair with decrementum. When a source invokes incrementum, it is almost always making a comparative or contrastive argument about whether something has grown or shrunk. Isolating the term without its counterpart often distorts its meaning.
Second, the Burrill entry in the source material appears to have been corrupted in transcription, running into the entry for INCUMBENT. This is a known hazard in digitized historical law dictionaries where entries were typeset in double columns and OCR or manual transcription introduced bleed-through between adjacent entries. Researchers relying on Burrill's for incrementum should treat the available text as incomplete and cross-check against Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence, which provide consistent and clean definitions.
In riparian and tidal land disputes found in older English equity records, incrementum may appear in describing gradual additions to a shoreline or riverbank — context that connects it to the law of accretion. In ecclesiastical records, it occasionally surfaces in connection with improvements to benefice property.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on substance: incrementum means increase or improvement, opposed to decrementum or abatement. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence are nearly verbatim. Burrill's entry is unrecoverable from the available text due to the transcription error noted above.
The unanimity of the three reliable sources reflects that incrementum was, by the time these dictionaries were compiled, a term of settled and narrow meaning — essentially a Latin technical label for a concept already well-understood in English as "increase." None of the sources elaborate on specific legal contexts of application, which is itself informative: by the late nineteenth century, the term had retreated to the status of a learned Latinism used mainly to gloss older authorities, rather than a working term in active legal argument.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is guidance on the specific procedural or substantive contexts in which incrementum appeared in earlier centuries. Researchers needing that depth should consult Cowell's Interpreter or Cowel's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Jacob's Law Dictionary, all of which address older Latin legal vocabulary with greater contextual detail than the American dictionaries represented here.