Definition
An archaic spelling variant of CALENDAR. In legal usage, a kalendar is an account of time exhibiting the days of the week and month, the seasons, and related temporal markers. All historical law dictionaries treat KALENDAR as a simple redirect to CALENDAR, and modern legal usage has entirely abandoned the K-spelling in favor of the C-spelling. See CALENDAR for substantive legal content.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An archaic form of "calendar"; also used specifically to refer to a liturgical calendar.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): See Calendar.
The ecclesiastical and liturgical sense of "kalendar" — designating the organized list of saints' days and religious feasts — appears in historical church records and canon law documents. Researchers encountering the K-spelling in older English legal manuscripts should be alert to this distinction: the term may refer not to a general account of time but specifically to a church or court scheduling document of formal or ceremonial character.
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Why It Matters in Research
The K-spelling is a reliable signal of age. Legal documents, pleadings, and court records predating the nineteenth century — particularly those of English origin — frequently use KALENDAR rather than CALENDAR. Researchers working in equity records, ecclesiastical court documents, Chancery proceedings, or early colonial materials should recognize KALENDAR as the same operative concept as CALENDAR and index accordingly.
Indexing and search traps are the primary hazard here. A full-text search of a historical corpus using only "calendar" will miss instances of "kalendar," and vice versa. This is especially relevant for Law Mind corpus researchers working with pre-1800 English or early American materials. Both spellings should be run whenever temporal or scheduling concepts are at issue.
The Roman law root — Kalendae, the first day of the Roman month — gives the K-spelling its historical pedigree, which is why it persisted longer in formal legal and ecclesiastical writing than in general usage. By the time Black's first edition was compiled, the editor noted that "calendar" was the more common spelling, suggesting the transition was already well advanced in American legal practice by the late nineteenth century.
No substantive legal meaning attaches to the spelling difference. The variation is orthographic, not conceptual.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries treat KALENDAR identically: as a cross-reference to CALENDAR, with no independent substantive definition. Black's (both editions) provides the only definition of substance — "an account of time, exhibiting the days of the week and month, the seasons, etc." — and both editions note that "calendar" is the more common spelling. Rapalje & Lawrence and Burrill both offer bare redirects without elaboration.
There is no divergence among the historical sources on this point, which itself is informative: by the time these dictionaries were compiled (late nineteenth century), KALENDAR had no independent legal valence worth recording. The term was already receding into orthographic history. Historical sources offer no discussion of the ecclesiastical usage that Wiktionary flags, suggesting that sense was not salient in Anglo-American legal practice even when the K-spelling was still in circulation.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Calendar (Court Scheduling and Docket Management); Calendar (Roman Law and Historical Time-Reckoning).
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