Definition
Intermarriage carries two distinct meanings in legal and popular usage that must be carefully distinguished.
1. In popular usage, intermarriage denotes marriage between persons regarded as members of different groups — nations, tribes, races, ethnic communities, religious communities, or families. The term captures the relational crossing of some recognized social or legal boundary through the institution of marriage.
2. In legal usage, intermarriage is sometimes used to mean simply the act of marrying or contracting a marriage — that is, the entering into the marriage relation itself, without reference to group difference. Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) notes this dual usage explicitly, observing that lawyers have at times employed "intermarriage" where "marriage" alone would serve, and that this technical usage, though less familiar, is defensible.
The legal significance of the term shifted dramatically across American history. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, state anti-miscegenation statutes expressly prohibited intermarriage between persons of different races, and the word "intermarriage" appeared as a term of art in those statutory regimes. That body of law was invalidated at the federal constitutional level, ending the primary legal context in which the term carried prohibitory force.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Marriage between people belonging to different groups, such as different racial, ethnic, or religious groups; mixed marriage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Connection by marriage; reciprocal marriage; giving and taking in marriage, as between two families, tribes, castes, or nations.
The common meaning of intermarriage has remained relatively stable — it denotes cross-group marriage. The legal usage diverges in two directions: first, statutes and courts historically weaponized the term as a label for prohibited conduct, giving it a regulatory dimension absent from ordinary speech; second, lawyers occasionally used the word in the neutral technical sense of "contracting a marriage," a usage that would confuse a lay reader expecting the cross-group connotation.
Common Confusion
Researchers sometimes conflate intermarriage with miscegenation. The terms overlapped heavily in anti-miscegenation statutory language, but they are not synonymous. Miscegenation, a word coined in 1863, was applied specifically to racial intermixture and carried explicit pseudoscientific and pejorative freight. Intermarriage was the broader, older term and appeared in contexts involving tribal membership, nationality, family alliances, and religion — not exclusively race. Reading nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources requires attention to which word the drafter chose and in which statutory or common-law context, as the choice affects scope and interpretation.
Why It Matters in Research
Corpus researchers face a term that functioned very differently across time, jurisdiction, and legal context. Several navigational points:
Historical statutory research: Anti-miscegenation statutes — enacted across many states from the colonial period through the mid-twentieth century — frequently used "intermarriage" as the operative legal term. Searching statutes and digests for "intermarriage" will surface this body of law. Searching for "miscegenation" alone may miss statutory text that employed the older word.
Federal Indian law: Intermarriage appeared in a distinct legal context involving tribal membership, land allotments, and citizenship status of persons who married into or out of tribal communities. The meaning and consequences of intermarriage in this context are governed by a separate body of doctrine and must not be read through the lens of anti-miscegenation law.
Neutral marriage-formation usage: When historical legal documents use intermarriage in the neutral sense of "contracting a marriage," context is essential. The word may appear in conditions precedent, inheritance provisions, or contract clauses where it simply means "if the parties marry" rather than "if the parties marry across group lines." Misreading the sense can invert the meaning of a document.
Post-1967 sources: After the constitutional invalidation of anti-miscegenation regimes, the prohibitory legal use of intermarriage became obsolete. Modern sources using the term almost always intend the popular cross-group meaning, often in demographic, sociological, or religious-law contexts.
Religious law: Intermarriage retains active legal significance in religious legal systems (Jewish law, canon law, and others) governing the validity of marriages contracted between members and non-members. Researchers working at the intersection of civil and religious law should distinguish the civil legal regime from religious legal consequences, which may appear in arbitration, divorce, and inheritance proceedings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the most useful analytical framework, explicitly distinguishing the popular sense (cross-group marriage) from the technical legal sense (marriage generally), and observing that both usages appear in legal sources. This is a practical warning that deserves weight: the entry does not endorse one usage over the other but flags the ambiguity as a source of interpretive risk.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law adds nothing substantive, directing the reader only to the entry for MARRIAGE. This cross-reference reflects a view that intermarriage is derivative and requires no independent treatment — a position that underestimates the term's independent statutory history but is consistent with the approach of many nineteenth-century legal lexicographers who treated marriage law as unified rather than differentiated by the parties' backgrounds.
Neither historical dictionary addresses the constitutional dimension — understandably, given their dates of publication — and neither engages with the federal Indian law context in any depth. Researchers should not rely on these sources for either of those bodies of doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
Anti-miscegenation laws varied significantly by state in their scope, terminology, and enforcement, with some states prohibiting only Black-white marriages and others extending prohibitions to additional racial categories. The federal constitutional baseline established in 1967 displaced all state variants. Federal Indian law intermarriage doctrine, by contrast, is national in application but tribe-specific in its membership consequences, governed by individual tribal constitutions and federal statutes.