Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law carrying several related meanings depending on context: (1) to hang or be suspended, particularly in the sense of legal uncertainty or a matter unresolved; (2) to be attached or appended, as unripened fruit remains attached to a tree; (3) to depend upon or derive from something else, as a right or obligation growing out of a prior legal relationship; (4) to pay, particularly in the context of satisfying a penalty or obligation.
PENDERE is not typically used as a standalone legal term in modern common law practice but appears as a root or component in several Latin legal phrases still in active use, most notably in the doctrine of lis pendens (a suit hanging or pending) and in the property concept of fructus pendentes (fruits hanging, i.e., attached to the land).
Why It Matters in Research
PENDERE functions primarily as a building block rather than a free-standing term of art, which creates a specific research trap: encountering it in a primary source or historical treatise without recognizing which sense is operative in that context. The four meanings are not interchangeable, and conflating them produces substantive errors.
The most consequential sense for property and real estate research is the "attached" meaning, which underpins the common law classification of growing crops and unharvested fruit as real versus personal property. Fructus pendentes — things still hanging, still attached — were treated as part of the land itself under classical civil law analysis, a distinction that traveled into English and American property doctrine and that researchers will encounter when tracing the historical roots of fixture law, crop liens, and mortgage disputes involving agricultural land.
The "pending" or "suspended" sense feeds directly into lis pendens and related procedural concepts. Researchers working backward from modern lis pendens doctrine to its civil law origins will encounter pendere in this suspension sense in Calvinus and similar civil law lexicons. Burrill's cross-reference to Calvinus Lexicon (Calv. Lex.) signals that this is the mediating source through which much civil law terminology entered English legal dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The "to pay a penalty" sense is the least frequently encountered in common law research but appears in translations of Roman penal and fiscal texts. Researchers working in ecclesiastical law, admiralty, or early American colonial sources drawing on civil law models should remain alert to this usage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is compact but carefully structured, presenting all four senses and tracing them to Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum, the standard Renaissance-era civil law dictionary and a primary intermediary source for English legal lexicographers. Burrill gives equal footing to all four meanings without ranking them by frequency, which is appropriate given that PENDERE was a general Latin verb whose legal valence depended entirely on the phrase in which it appeared.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide — and what researchers should not expect to find there — is a worked synthesis of how the different senses operate in different substantive fields. The property sense (fructus pendentes) and the procedural sense (lis pendens) developed along largely independent lines in common law reception, and Burrill's entry does not draw that distinction. Researchers should use the historical dictionary entry as a gateway to the compound terms rather than as a self-contained guide to the concept.