Definition
A person who has been convicted of, or is guilty of, a misdemeanor — that is, a criminal offense below the grade of felony. The term is applied both to one found guilty by verdict or plea and to one sentenced to punishment following such conviction. In practice, misdemeanant functions as the personal noun corresponding to misdemeanor, identifying the individual offender rather than the offense itself.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone convicted of a misdemeanor; also, more broadly, someone guilty of misconduct or a wrongdoer generally.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One guilty of a misdemeanor.
The ordinary English usage is broad enough to cover general misconduct or misbehavior without any criminal law dimension. The legal term is narrower and more precise: a misdemeanant is defined by formal criminal conviction or guilt of a legally classified misdemeanor offense, not merely blameworthy conduct. A researcher encountering the word in non-legal historical texts should not assume a criminal law context.
Common Confusion
Misdemeanant is sometimes loosely used as a synonym for offender or convict, but those terms carry no grade-of-offense specificity. A felon is not a misdemeanant. In jurisdictions that recognize intermediate offense categories — such as gross misdemeanor or wobblers — the question of whether a person is properly called a misdemeanant may depend on the final disposition of the charge rather than its initial classification.
Why It Matters in Research
The term is relatively stable in meaning but carries an important jurisdictional and historical wrinkle: the English prison classification system created a formal legal category — the first-class misdemeanant — that does not exist in American law and that appears prominently in older English-law sources, including the Black's entries in the Law Mind corpus. Researchers working with nineteenth-century English criminal law materials will encounter elaborate distinctions between misdemeanants of the first and second division, governing prison treatment, labor requirements, and conditions of confinement. These classifications were creatures of statute (principally the Prisons Act 1865) and have no American analog. American sources using the word misdemeanant are almost always doing so in the simple descriptive sense — a person convicted of a misdemeanor — without invoking any classification framework.
The term also matters at the edges of criminal procedure research. Bail, sentencing, probation, and collateral consequences doctrine frequently turn on the felony/misdemeanor distinction, and older cases or treatises may use misdemeanant as a term of art to trigger or exclude particular procedural rules. Researchers tracing the development of misdemeanor sentencing or jail conditions doctrine should flag every instance of this word as potentially carrying that doctrinal weight.
In corpus searches, note that Bouvier's entry trails off mid-word in the Law Mind scan, directing readers to FIRST-CLASS MISDEMEANANT — that cross-reference entry, if recoverable, carries the substantive English law content.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a person guilty of a misdemeanor, or one sentenced upon conviction of a misdemeanor. The agreement is essentially verbatim across Black's first and second editions and Bouvier's, suggesting the term was uncontroversial and needed little elaboration in the American context.
The more interesting content in the historical sources lies in what they point to rather than what they say. Both Black's editions and Bouvier's cross-reference FIRST-CLASS MISDEMEANANT, signaling that the classification system under the English Prisons Act 1865 was considered important enough to warrant a dedicated entry. This reflects the strong influence of English criminal law on American legal dictionaries of the late nineteenth century, even for doctrines that had no direct American application. Researchers should treat the bare Black's definition as the American working definition and seek the first-class misdemeanant cross-reference for English law context.
Webster's 1913 confirms the word carried ordinary English currency beyond legal writing, citing Sydney Smith — a literary and journalistic reference that underscores the term's accessibility outside professional legal usage.
Jurisdictional Note
In American law, misdemeanant tracks the felony/misdemeanor line as drawn by each state's penal code; because that line varies — some states classify offenses as infractions, misdemeanors, gross misdemeanors, and felonies — who qualifies as a misdemeanant for a given legal purpose may differ across jurisdictions. English law historically used the term within a formal prison-classification framework that American law never adopted.