Definition
An archaic spelling variant of ENLARGE, used in older English legal texts to denote the act of releasing or setting a person at liberty — particularly from imprisonment or legal restraint. In practice, to inlarge a prisoner meant to discharge them from custody, whether by bail, judicial order, or expiration of confinement. The term carried no distinct legal meaning of its own; it is encountered solely as a spelling form and should be treated as equivalent to enlarge in all legal senses.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Archaic spelling of enlarge.
Historical common usage: Not separately entered in Webster's 1913; the term was already receding from standard use by that period.
The gap here is not between common and legal meaning but between the archaic spelling and the modern reader's expectations. A researcher encountering "inlarge" in an old document should not assume an unfamiliar legal concept — it is simply enlarge rendered in an earlier orthographic convention.
Common Confusion
INLARGE vs. ENLARGE: These are the same word. No substantive legal distinction exists between them. The "in-" prefix here is not the privative or intensifying Latin prefix but a period spelling convention in which "in-" and "en-" were interchangeable in English. A researcher who indexes or searches for one form without accounting for the other risks missing relevant material in historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research risk is invisibility. Full-text searches of digitized early English reports, Year Books, or colonial American legal records using the modern spelling "enlarge" will not surface passages written as "inlarge." Because the Law Mind corpus includes historical sources spanning several centuries, researchers working on questions of bail, habeas relief, or judicial release should run searches on both spellings.
The Burrill citation — Cas. temp. Talb. 25 — refers to Cases Tempore Talbot, a collection of English Chancery cases from the era of Lord Chancellor Talbot (1733–1737). This places the term's documented legal use in the early eighteenth century. By the time of Burrill's own compilation (mid-nineteenth century), "inlarge" had become sufficiently obsolete that Burrill flagged it as an "old form" rather than defining it substantively.
Researchers transcribing or quoting primary sources should preserve the original spelling in quotation but use the modern form in analytical text to ensure cross-reference consistency within the corpus.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and his treatment is appropriately brief: "An old form of enlarge." The single citation to Cases Tempore Talbot anchors the term to a specific moment in English legal history without overstating its significance. No other major legal dictionaries — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — carry a separate entry for inlarge, which itself confirms that the variant was recognized as archaic even in the nineteenth century. There is nothing to reconcile across sources; there is only the uniform verdict that this is a spelling fossil, not an independent legal term.
Jurisdictional Note
The variant spelling appears primarily in English legal sources and in early American materials drawn from English practice. It is unlikely to appear in civil law or Scottish sources. Researchers in American colonial records may encounter it in jurisdictions that followed English common law procedural forms closely.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See ENLARGEMENT for the substantive legal concept to which this term belongs.