Definition
An archaic spelling variant of ENTITLE. In historical legal texts, "intitle" carries the same meaning as its modern form: to give a legal right, claim, or interest; to qualify a person for a benefit, remedy, or position; or to designate a document, statute, or pleading by a formal name or heading. The term appears in older English legal records and reports but has no independent substantive meaning distinct from "entitle." Researchers encountering "intitle" in primary sources should treat it as equivalent to "entitle" in all legal contexts.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Archaic spelling of "entitle."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): See Entitle.
Both common and legal usage treat "intitle" as a simple spelling variant with no independent meaning. There is no gap between common and legal usage here; the term is purely orthographic.
Common Confusion
INTITLE / ENTITLE: These are not two legal concepts — they are one concept in two orthographic forms. The only confusion that arises is bibliographic: assuming that historical spelling is standardized enough that searching "entitle" will recover all relevant historical instances. It will not always do so.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of recognizing "intitle" is bibliographic and indexing. Legal databases and digitized historical sources may not normalize spelling variants, meaning a full-text search for "entitle" will miss instances where older printers or clerks used "intitle." This is particularly relevant when working with English law reports and statutes from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, where spelling had not yet stabilized. The citation appearing in the historical dictionaries — 6 Mod. 304 — refers to the sixth volume of Modern Reports, an English law report series covering cases from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and signals the period during which this spelling was current in judicial writing.
Researchers working in colonial American sources, early state statutes, or pre-nineteenth-century English pleading records should include "intitle" as an alternative search term whenever searching for rights, qualifications, or document headings. Optical character recognition errors in digitized sources may also produce "intitle" where the original text reads "entitle," or vice versa, so both spellings warrant attention when transcription accuracy is uncertain.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry for "intitle" redirects to "entitle" without substantive commentary, which is standard practice for spelling variants in legal dictionaries of that era. Researchers should follow that redirect and apply the full analytical framework of ENTITLE when interpreting any instance of "intitle" in historical materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill — treat "intitle" identically: as an old form of "entitle," with no independent definition offered. The uniformity of this treatment across dictionaries compiled at different times confirms that the variant was already recognized as archaic by the time these reference works were published. None of the sources suggest any divergence in legal meaning between the two spellings. Black's and Burrill each cite 6 Mod. 304 as documentary support for the variant's historical use, grounding the entry in a real evidentiary source rather than mere editorial assertion.