Definition
Of the masculine sex; designating the sex that begets offspring, as distinguished from the female sex. In legal usage, "male" operates primarily as a classificatory term — a descriptor used in statutes, wills, deeds, and constitutional instruments to identify persons by sex for purposes of inheritance, succession, eligibility, franchise, or legal status.
The term has both a biological and a legal dimension. Historically, legal instruments used "male" to restrict or qualify rights, entitlements, and obligations: entailed estates limited to male heirs, franchise rights tied to male persons, and public offices open only to males. The term's legal weight, therefore, has never been purely descriptive — it has carried significant distributive consequences.
In modern law, "male" continues to appear as a classificatory term in statutes concerning sex discrimination, gender-based classifications subject to constitutional scrutiny, vital statistics, and anti-discrimination frameworks. The interpretive question of what "male" means has grown considerably more complex as courts and legislatures have confronted the relationship between biological sex, gender identity, and legal sex designation.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Belonging to the sex which typically produces sperm, or to the gender typically associated with it; characteristic of that sex or gender.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Evil; wicked; bad. [Obsolete]
The Webster's 1913 entry is a distinct homograph — the archaic English adjective "male" meaning evil or wicked (surviving in legal compounds such as "malefactor" and "malfeasance") — not the sex-designating term. Researchers encountering early legal texts must distinguish these two words, which are identical in spelling but entirely different in origin and meaning. The evil-meaning "male" is a borrowing from the Latin malus (bad); the sex-designating "male" derives from a separate Latin root. Historical legal dictionaries, including Burrill's, treat the Latin-origin "male" (badly, unfavorably) as a separate headword entirely. Conflation in early texts is possible and warrants attention.
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Common Confusion
Two distinct words share this spelling in legal historical sources:
1. MALE (sex) — the sex-designating adjective, the primary subject of this entry.
2. MALE (Latin prefix/adverb) — from Latin malus, meaning bad or ill, appearing in compounds such as malefactor, malfeasance, male fide, and maledict. Burrill's Law Dictionary treats this form explicitly, defining it as "badly; unfavorably."
Researchers in early English and Latin legal texts should confirm which sense is operative before drawing interpretive conclusions. The confusion is most acute in abbreviated or Latinized legal instruments where context may not immediately resolve the ambiguity.
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Why It Matters in Research
The primary research challenge with "male" is not definitional ambiguity within the sex-designating sense — the word has always meant what it says — but rather the profound shift in legal consequences attached to sex classification over time.
Pre-20th century sources: "Male" in wills, deeds, and statutes functioned as an eligibility filter, not merely a description. Fee tail male, male franchise requirements, and male-only public office eligibility were standard instruments of property and governance. Researchers reading old instruments must understand that "male heirs" or "male issue" carried technical inheritance consequences distinct from "heirs" or "issue" generally. Rapalje & Lawrence flags "male children" as a term requiring careful attention in will construction, noting that courts treated it as potentially equivalent to "male descendants" — a significant extension.
20th century and onward: Constitutional equal protection doctrine (particularly under intermediate scrutiny for sex-based classifications) transformed the legal valence of "male" in public law. Statutory uses of "male" in the Code of Federal Regulations, state vital statistics laws, and benefit eligibility frameworks became contested grounds. Researchers working in civil rights, employment discrimination, and benefits law should track statutory amendments carefully, as the term has been added, removed, or qualified in numerous contexts.
Contemporary law: The legal definition of "male" for purposes of identity documents, sex-segregated facilities, sports eligibility, and anti-discrimination statutes is actively contested and varies by jurisdiction. Law Mind corpus sources predating roughly 2015 may not reflect current legislative or regulatory positions. Treat definitions in this area as temporally bounded.
The Burrill homograph is a genuine trap for researchers: Latin legal maxims and early common law texts using "male" as an adverb or prefix meaning "badly" (e.g., male fidei possessor — possessor in bad faith) can be misread if the reader applies the sex-designating meaning.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in near-complete agreement on the sex-designating definition: all formulate it as "of the masculine sex; of the sex that begets young." Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's give nearly identical language. There is nothing technically contested among these sources on the core definition.
Rapalje & Lawrence add the most substantive legal content, noting the will-construction question around "male children" as equivalent to "male descendants" — a point the other dictionaries ignore. This is a useful reminder that the operative legal question was often not what "male" meant in isolation, but how sex-qualifying terms interacted with words of inheritance such as "children," "issue," and "heirs."
Bouvier's entry is noteworthy for appending, immediately following the MALE definition, entries for MALEDICTION (a curse annexed to church land donations) and MALEFACTOR — confirming that the Latin-origin "male" compounds occupied adjacent conceptual space even in organized legal reference works of the 19th century.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law entry under this headword appears to be a pagination or classification error in the source — the text provided addresses maintenance (champerty and barratry), not sex designation. This is a known hazard with historical dictionary digitization; researchers should verify page-level accuracy when consulting Anderson's.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: any engagement with contested sex classification, the intersection of sex and gender, or the constitutional dimensions of sex-based legal distinctions. These issues are entirely post-dating their composition.
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Jurisdictional Note
The legal definition of "male" for purposes of vital records, identity documents, and anti-discrimination statutes varies significantly across U.S. jurisdictions and has changed rapidly since approximately 2015. Some states permit non-binary sex designations on official documents; others have enacted statutes codifying a binary biological definition. Federal agency definitions have shifted across administrations. Researchers should not assume that a statutory use of "male" in one jurisdiction carries the same legal meaning or scope as the same term in another.
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