Definition
"Ing" is not a unified legal term. The word appears in historical legal dictionaries in three unrelated senses, none of which survives in modern legal usage:
1. Comparison of handwriting. In older evidentiary practice, "ing" appears in some sources as a compressed or variant heading for the comparison of a disputed writing against a known exemplar to determine common authorship. This is the method now addressed under the law of authentication and document examination.
2. A base or contemptible person. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) records "ing" as an archaic English term meaning a vile, base person or sluggard; chicken-hearted. The citation is to Spelman's Glossarium (a glossary of obsolete legal and historical terms). This meaning has no operational legal significance.
3. Scottish and Scots-adjacent process terms. Burrill's Law Dictionary records "ing" in connection with Scots law practice — specifically in the context of letters issued under the signet charging persons to act or pay within a prefixed time, on pain of outlawry or distraint. Bouvier separately records a Scots privy council instrument prohibiting intercourse with denounced persons. These entries likely reflect partial or corrupted headwords from longer Scots legal terms (such as "letters of horning" or "letters of inhibition"), not a freestanding term called "ing."
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A meadow, especially a low meadow near a river; a water meadow.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A pasture or meadow; generally one lying low, near a river. Marked as obsolete or provincial English.
The common meaning — a low-lying meadow or water meadow — is a genuine Old and Middle English word still embedded in English place names (Reading, Barking, Epping). It has no independent legal meaning, though it occasionally appears in historical land descriptions and conveyancing records where place names derived from "ing" identify the land conveyed. Researchers encountering "ing" in early deed or title records should treat it as a geographic descriptor, not a term of art.
Common Confusion
The historical dictionary entries under "ing" appear to be artifacts of partial indexing, truncation, or alphabetical spillover from adjacent headwords. The handwriting comparison entry is almost certainly a fragment of a longer entry on "comparing writings" or "comparison of handwriting." The Scots law entries almost certainly belong under "letters of horning," "letters of inhibition," or related diligence headings. Researchers should not treat the "ing" entries in Black's, Bouvier's, or Burrill's as evidence that "ing" was itself a recognized legal term of art in any of these senses. Cross-check adjacent entries in the original source before relying on any "ing" entry for historical legal meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a research trap, not a research resource. Several failure modes are worth flagging:
First, corpus search. A full-text search for "ing" in the Law Mind corpus will return an unmanageable volume of false positives, since "-ing" is a standard English verbal suffix. Any targeted search must be designed carefully — exact-phrase matching, context filtering, or wildcard controls — to avoid noise.
Second, historical dictionary navigation. The Black's and Burrill's entries under "ing" appear to be indexing artifacts or truncations. A researcher who encounters one of these entries and treats it as authoritative without checking the surrounding context risks misreading a partial entry as a complete definition.
Third, Scots law research. If the actual target is Scots diligence procedure — letters of horning, inhibition, or poinding — the researcher should go directly to those headwords rather than relying on the "ing" entries, which are incomplete at best and misdirected at worst.
Fourth, historical conveyancing. If "ing" appears in an old deed, grant, or boundary description, the most likely explanation is a place name element (Old English -ing or -inga, meaning a meadow or the people of a place), not a legal term. Local historical and toponymic references will be more useful than legal dictionaries here.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in disarray on this term. Black's (both editions) defines "ing" as a base person, citing Spelman — a plausible entry for a glossary of archaic English but of no practical legal utility. The same Black's entry (first edition) pivots mid-paragraph to describe handwriting comparison, suggesting the entry is either corrupted or covers two entirely different headwords under one heading. Bouvier redirects to "handwriting" without defining anything. Rapalje & Lawrence provides substantive content on handwriting comparison that is useful, but the connection to the headword "ing" is unclear; the passage reads like a continuation of a longer entry. Burrill gives Scots process content without establishing why it appears under "ing."
No historical source treats "ing" as a coherent, freestanding legal term with an agreed definition. The dictionaries neither agree nor productively disagree — they simply appear to be filing different content under the same three letters for different reasons.
Jurisdictional Note
The Scots law content in Burrill and Bouvier reflects pre-1868 Scots procedure and has no application in U.S. or English common law jurisdictions. The handwriting comparison content reflects common law evidentiary rules that have since been superseded by statutory and rule-based authentication frameworks in both England (beginning with the Common Law Procedure Act 1854) and the United States.