Definition
A historical legal term appearing in two distinct archaic senses in English and continental legal records:
1. (Maritime/Insurance law) The contract of insurance itself. Used in early French maritime ordinances to denote the insurance agreement or policy — the foundational document of the marine insurance relationship.
2. (Commercial/Weights and measures law) The weight and measure applied to merchants' goods. Used in early English records to describe the system or standard of measurement governing commercial commodities.
Both senses are obsolete in modern legal usage. Neither survives as an operative term in contemporary English, American, or maritime law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In the context of mahjong, a call made to claim a discarded tile and form a set of three identical tiles (a pung).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry recorded.
The gap between the mahjong usage and the legal usages is total — they share only a phonetic form. A researcher encountering "pon" in a legal document should not associate it with the tile game sense under any circumstances. The mahjong usage is of East Asian origin and entirely unrelated to the Latin and Old French roots of the legal term.
Common Confusion
The two legal senses of "pon" are themselves easily conflated because both appear in archaic commercial contexts. Distinguish them by documentary context: the insurance sense derives from French maritime ordinance (Ordonnance de la Marine) and will appear in sources discussing contracts of assurance or marine risk; the weights and measures sense derives from early English patent and administrative records and will appear in sources governing merchant trade standards. A researcher who treats all instances of "pon" as referring to insurance will misread commercial regulation records, and vice versa.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a trap for researchers working in pre-modern commercial and maritime law. Its two senses pull in entirely different directions — contract formation on one hand, regulatory standards on the other — yet the word itself provides no internal signal about which sense applies. Context and source type are the only reliable guides.
For the insurance sense: Burrill points to the Ordonnance de la Marine (Ord. Mar. liv. 3, tit. 6, art. 2), the French royal maritime ordinance of 1681. Researchers working in early modern marine insurance history will encounter this ordinance frequently. The term "pon" here situates within a broader Continental terminological tradition for insurance contracts that differs from the English "policy" vocabulary that dominated later common law development. Cross-referencing with treatises on marine insurance will help locate this usage in context.
For the weights and measures sense: Burrill cites Pat. 1 Hen. III. m. 10 — a patent roll from the reign of Henry III — and refers to Cowell (John Cowell's Interpreter, the early seventeenth-century legal dictionary). This places the term squarely in English administrative and mercantile law of the medieval period. Researchers working in the history of commercial regulation, assizes of weights and measures, or early trade governance may encounter it in archival patent and close roll records.
Neither sense will appear in modern legal databases or current statutory compilations. Researchers are most likely to encounter "pon" in digitized archives, historical treatises, or secondary works on the history of commercial law. The term does not survive in any recognized common law doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source identifying this term. Burrill records both senses without elaboration beyond the citations, suggesting even by the mid-nineteenth century the term was sufficiently obscure to require sourcing rather than explanation. Burrill does not offer a Latin or French original form in the entry, though the insurance sense is clearly rooted in the French maritime ordinance tradition and the weights-and-measures sense in early English administrative Latin.
No other major historical law dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — including Black's, Bouvier's, or Tomlin's — appear to carry this term, which itself signals its limited circulation in English-language legal practice. Cowell's Interpreter (cited by Burrill for the weights and measures sense) would be the next-closest shelf source worth consulting for the commercial regulatory meaning.
Jurisdictional Note
Both senses are historically bounded rather than jurisdictionally comparative in the modern sense. The insurance sense is primarily French and Continental in origin; the weights and measures sense is English. Neither was transplanted into American legal usage.