Definition
An adverb describing an act carried out with premeditation — that is, with prior thought or deliberation before the act was committed. In criminal law, "premeditatedly" modifies the manner of killing (or other act) to establish that the actor formed the intent and thought upon it in advance, however briefly. The duration of prior thought required is minimal; courts have long held that premeditation need not be prolonged — any appreciable reflection before the act suffices.
The term appears most often in first-degree murder statutes and indictments, where the killing must have been committed "willfully, deliberately, and premeditatedly." In that formulation, "premeditatedly" does not stand alone as an independent element but reinforces and partially overlaps with the surrounding adverbs.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "In a premeditated manner."
Historical common usage: The adverbial form would have been understood in ordinary speech as simply "having planned or thought about something beforehand," carrying no technical legal content beyond that plain sense.
Editorial note: The gap between common and legal usage is narrow in one direction but significant in another. Common usage suggests extended planning; legal usage requires only that some thought preceded the act, however short the interval. A researcher who imports the common-sense notion of elaborate advance planning into a legal source will misread both statutes and judicial opinions that treat a moment's reflection as legally sufficient premeditation.
Common Confusion
PREMEDITATEDLY vs. DELIBERATELY: These terms are closely related but not interchangeable in their legal functions. Bouvier notes that "deliberately" logically contains all that is meant by "premeditatedly" — and more. Deliberation implies a cooler, more measured weighing of consequences, while premeditation requires only that thought preceded the act. The two terms often appear together in first-degree murder formulations precisely because each does slightly different work: "deliberately" speaks to the quality of the mental state; "premeditatedly" speaks to its temporal relationship to the act.
PREMEDITATEDLY vs. WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT: Bouvier also notes that "premeditatedly" is contained within the concept of "malice aforethought," but the two are not synonyms. Malice aforethought is a broader term of art encompassing multiple states of mind that can support a murder charge, only some of which involve actual premeditation. A killing can be with malice aforethought without being premeditatedly committed in the specific first-degree sense.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively as a statutory or charging instrument term rather than a freestanding doctrinal concept. Researchers will encounter it primarily in:
1. Indictments and charging instruments, particularly in jurisdictions that track the common law formula for first-degree murder.
2. Jury instructions, where courts must explain the word's meaning — often producing the judicial gloss that any period of prior thought, however short, is sufficient.
3. Appellate opinions parsing whether a jury instruction that omitted or substituted this term (e.g., using only "deliberately") was reversible error.
The Missouri cases cited in Bouvier (106 Mo. 198 and 108 Mo. 205; 118 Mo. 96) reflect late nineteenth-century courts working through exactly these definitional boundary questions — a common pattern as states codified degrees of murder and litigated the meaning of the statutory adverbs. Researchers using nineteenth-century sources should be alert to the fact that the doctrinal content of "premeditatedly" was still being worked out during that period; a source from 1870 may not reflect the settled interpretation that emerged by 1900.
Jurisdictional variation in the underlying statutes matters significantly here: some states dropped "premeditatedly" from their murder statutes in twentieth-century revisions, replacing the common law adverbial cluster with modern formulations (e.g., "with premeditation and deliberation" or purpose-based definitions). In those jurisdictions, historical sources using "premeditatedly" describe superseded law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the primary source available here, and its entry is compact but instructive. It makes three points worth synthesizing:
First, premeditation does not require extended time — "any length of time, however short" suffices. This was a deliberate judicial and legislative choice to prevent defendants from escaping first-degree liability by arguing the killing was impulsive despite clear prior intent.
Second, Bouvier draws the deliberation/premeditation distinction directly, treating deliberation as the larger concept. This hierarchy is worth noting: in Bouvier's formulation, a deliberate act is always premeditated, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Subsequent courts have not always been consistent on this point, and researchers should not assume uniform treatment across jurisdictions or periods.
Third, Bouvier locates "premeditatedly" as a component of "malice aforethought," situating the term within the older common law framework rather than treating it as a purely statutory creature. This connection is important for reading pre-codification sources, where the modern degrees-of-murder structure did not yet exist.
No other major historical dictionaries are available in this source set. Researchers should consult Wharton's Criminal Law and Bishop's Criminal Law for contemporaneous treatise treatment of the term in context.
Jurisdictional Note
The term's legal significance varies by whether the jurisdiction retains the traditional "willfully, deliberately, and premeditatedly" statutory formula. Several states have modernized their murder statutes in ways that eliminate the adverb while preserving the underlying doctrine under different language. Research in any specific state requires checking the current statutory text against the historical formulation before relying on cases that interpret "premeditatedly."
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: PREMEDITATION; MURDER, DEGREES OF; MALICE AFORETHOUGHT