Definition
A Law French preposition meaning "by" or "for." Pur functions primarily as a particle in historical legal compounds and phrases rather than as a standalone term. It appears in classical common law terminology both independently and as a prefix forming composite words. Its principal appearances in legal sources are:
1. As a component of set phrases: most importantly, pur autre vie (for the life of another) and pur cause de vicinage (by reason of neighborhood).
2. As a formative prefix: pur combines with English or French elements to produce terms such as purparty (a share in a partition), purlieu (land at the edge of a forest), and purview (the enacting part of a statute).
The term is sometimes spelled pour, reflecting closer adherence to modern French, but pur is the dominant spelling in English legal sources. Bouvier notes it as a corruption of the French par.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A dated form of purr — the low murmuring sound made by a cat.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To utter a low, murmuring, continued sound, as a cat does when pleased."
The common English word has no connection whatsoever to the legal term. The legal pur is a Law French preposition; the common pur is an archaic spelling of an animal sound. Researchers encountering pur in a legal text should not be misled by the ordinary English word.
Common Confusion
Pur is sometimes mistakenly read as a variant of the modern French pour or as a typographical oddity. It is neither. It is a stable Law French form with its own settled orthography in legal literature. Separately, pur should not be confused with per, the Latin preposition also meaning "by" or "through," which appears in distinct legal phrases such as per stirpes or per autre vie (the latter being a Latinized variant occasionally found in older texts alongside the French form).
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The most frequently encountered compounds and phrases:
PUR AUTRE VIE — "For the life of another." Describes an estate limited in duration to the life of a person other than the grantee. The grantee (called the cestui que vie) holds the property only so long as the measuring life continues. This is the most practically significant phrase in which pur appears and has its own treatment in major historical dictionaries.
PUR CAUSE DE VICINAGE — "By reason of neighborhood." A common law doctrine permitting cattle straying from one common to an adjacent common to feed without being treated as trespassers, provided the commons are adjacent and open. Black's 2nd edition directs readers to the entry for COMMON.
PURPARTY — A share allotted to a coparcener upon partition of an estate. Derived from pur + part + the Anglo-French suffix -ie.
PURLIEU — Land adjoining a royal forest that was once part of the forest but later disafforested. The pur element here carries a sense of "through" or "alongside."
PURVIEW — The enacting clause or operative scope of a statute. The term survives in modern legal usage, though its Law French origins are rarely recognized.
Why It Matters in Research
Pur itself will almost never appear as a headword in a modern legal research query — it matters because it unlocks the compound terms built from it. Researchers working in early common law materials, colonial American records, property law history, or statutory interpretation will encounter pur-compounds repeatedly.
The key navigational point: when you find an unfamiliar pur- word in a historical source, the first analytical step is to parse it as pur + a recognizable English or French root. This resolves most instances without needing a separate dictionary search.
Pur autre vie is the term most likely to appear in live legal contexts, particularly in property law, life estates, and trust instruments. Its historical dictionary treatment is consistent and reliable across all five source dictionaries, though Burrill's entry is fragmentary and unhelpful on this point.
For researchers using the Law Mind corpus: phrases containing pur are often found in property treatises, forest law materials, partition proceedings, and statutory preamble analyses. The term per (Latin) and pur (Law French) can appear in adjacent passages, and conflating them will distort meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries agree on the core definition: pur is a Law French preposition meaning "by" or "for." Black's (both editions) and Anderson's are concise. Bouvier adds the useful note that it is a corruption of the French par, which helps explain the orthographic variation between pur and pour found across sources. Anderson's is the only dictionary to flag the pour variant explicitly, which is worth noting for researchers who may encounter both spellings in the same corpus.
Burrill's entry is not useful here — the relevant passage in the source material appears to be a scanning artifact mixing unrelated content, and no substantive definition of pur is recoverable from it.
None of the historical dictionaries treat pur as a term of art in its own right. They use it as a gateway entry to the compound phrases, particularly pur autre vie. Researchers should treat Black's 2nd edition's sub-entries under pur as the most complete single-source treatment of the phrase family.
Jurisdictional Note
Pur autre vie remains a recognized estate form in American and English property law, though modern statutes in many U.S. jurisdictions have simplified the vocabulary. The phrase itself persists in academic and doctrinal writing even where the underlying concept has been codified. Pur cause de vicinage is primarily of historical relevance in American law, where open-range common law doctrines have been substantially modified or abolished by state statute.