Definition
Pour acquit (French: "for receipt" or "for discharge") is a formula phrase historically used in French legal and commercial practice. A creditor would write or stamp "pour acquit" before signing a document to indicate that a debt had been received and discharged. The phrase functioned as an acknowledgment of payment — the creditor's signed endorsement of the words constituted a formal receipt, confirming that the obligation referenced in the underlying instrument had been satisfied.
In practical terms, pour acquit served the same purpose as a modern receipt or paid stamp: it was a brief, standardized declaration that transformed a creditor's signature into evidence of full settlement. The phrase appeared most commonly on bills of exchange, promissory notes, and commercial invoices in civil law jurisdictions influenced by French legal tradition.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not a general English term. Wiktionary recognizes it as a French phrase meaning "for receipt," used in commercial and legal contexts to acknowledge payment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The phrase was never absorbed into ordinary English usage and remained a term of art within French law and civil law commercial practice.
The gap here is not between legal and common meaning, but between French commercial usage and English legal awareness. English-language legal dictionaries preserved the term because of its appearance in civil law instruments and French-influenced commercial documents, not because it entered English practice.
Why It Matters in Research
Pour acquit is a navigational term rather than a doctrinal one. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in one of three contexts:
First, in translated or annotated civil law materials — particularly French commercial law texts, Louisiana legal sources, or Quebec legal documents — where the phrase appears on reproduced instruments as a payment endorsement.
Second, in historical English-language legal dictionaries and treatises discussing French or comparative commercial law. Its presence in Black's signals that American lawyers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries needed to recognize the term when handling international commercial instruments or interpreting documents governed by French law.
Third, in historical business records and financial documents from French-speaking jurisdictions. Archival researchers working with notarial records, merchant account books, or colonial-era commercial instruments from Louisiana, Quebec, or former French territories may encounter pour acquit as a standard notational convention on receipted bills.
The term has no independent doctrinal significance in American common law. It does not generate case law, and it does not correspond to a formal legal concept requiring analysis. Its value is purely identificatory: knowing what the phrase means prevents misreading a historical document as unpaid or unresolved when it has in fact been formally discharged.
Researchers working in Louisiana law should be aware that French civil law conventions — including commercial formulas like pour acquit — had more direct influence on Louisiana practice than on other American jurisdictions, and may appear with greater frequency in Louisiana notarial archives.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary entries are in substantive agreement, with the second edition entry being a near-verbatim restatement of the first. Neither entry elaborates beyond the single-sentence identification of pour acquit as a creditor's receipt formula. This brevity is appropriate: the term is descriptive rather than analytically complex, and the historical dictionaries correctly treat it as a term needing identification, not interpretation.
What the historical sources do not address is the procedural significance of the formula within French commercial law — specifically, how the signed pour acquit functioned as presumptive evidence of payment and what weight it carried in disputes over whether a debt had been discharged. Researchers needing that level of detail will need to look beyond Black's to primary French commercial law sources or comparative law treatises.
Jurisdictional Note
Pour acquit is a term of French civil law and has no direct equivalent in common law jurisdictions. Its relevance in American legal research is concentrated in Louisiana, where French civil law heritage is strongest, and in historical contexts involving international commercial instruments governed by French law or drafted under French legal conventions.