Definition
In law, "quick" means living or alive. The term appears most often in two distinct legal contexts:
1. Quick chattels. Livestock and other living personal property. At common law, quick chattels required pound-overt (an open, visible pound) when impounded, so that the owner could access and feed them. Dead chattels — inanimate goods — carried no such requirement.
2. Quick with child. A pregnant woman who has felt fetal movement. At common law, this was the legally significant threshold of pregnancy, carrying consequences for the execution of sentences, the rights of the unborn, and, historically, abortion law. A woman "quick with child" could plead her pregnancy to stay execution of a capital sentence.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Quickly, in a quick manner." The adjectival sense — speedy, fast — is the overwhelmingly dominant modern meaning.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Alive; living; animate — opposed to dead or inanimate." Webster's also records the speed sense as a secondary meaning, noting "characterized by life or liveliness; animated; sprightly; agile; brisk."
Editorial note: This is a case where historical common usage and historical legal usage aligned closely, but modern common usage has almost entirely displaced the "living" sense. A researcher encountering "quick" in an older legal text must resist the modern reflex to read it as "fast" or "prompt." The word meant alive.
Common Confusion
The legal sense of "quick" (alive) and the everyday sense (fast) create a genuine reading trap in older sources. Phrases like "quick chattels" or "the quick and the dead" are opaque to modern readers who have lost the living/dead distinction the word once carried. Separately, "quick with child" is sometimes loosely equated with conception or with any stage of pregnancy — an error with real legal consequence, since at common law the quickening threshold was specifically the moment of perceived fetal movement, not conception.
Why It Matters in Research
The term is low-frequency in modern legal writing but appears reliably in two research contexts where precision matters:
Distress and pound law. Historical property disputes involving impounded livestock will use "quick" as a term of art. Confusing it with "prompt" or "speedy" produces nonsensical readings. The Finch citation reproduced in all major historical dictionaries — "Quick chattels must be put in pound-overt that the owner may give them sustenance" — is the anchor passage; tracking that rule through English common law materials requires holding the "living" meaning firmly in mind.
Abortion and capital punishment history. "Quick with child" was the operative legal standard for pleading the belly — a pregnant woman's claim to stay execution — and formed the constitutional baseline referenced in pre-Roe abortion jurisprudence. Researchers working in the history of reproductive law, fetal personhood, or capital punishment will encounter this phrase repeatedly. Its meaning shifted over time: early common law sources tie quickening to felt fetal movement (roughly 16–20 weeks); later statutes sometimes used "quick with child" as a proxy for any pregnancy. That ambiguity is a known interpretive problem in the historical record.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law redirects the reader to DISPATCH and QUICKENING without providing a substantive entry. This is unhelpful for the pound-law context and underscores that the livestock sense had begun receding from active legal use by the late nineteenth century. Researchers should not treat the Anderson cross-reference as exhaustive.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Burrill agree on the core definition — "living; alive" — and all three reproduce the Finch passage on quick chattels as the illustrative authority. The agreement is essentially verbatim, suggesting the definition had settled early and was carried forward without revision. None of the shelf sources develops the "quick with child" meaning at length under this headword; that doctrine is distributed across entries on QUICKENING, PLEADING THE BELLY, and REPRIEVE in the broader corpus. Burrill adds a cross-reference to "Quyke," the Middle English spelling, which is useful when reading pre-modern sources. Anderson's near-complete omission of substantive content under this headword reflects either editorial judgment that the term needed no independent treatment or a gap in the dictionary's coverage of property and criminal procedure history.
Jurisdictional Note
The "quick with child" standard was part of English common law received into American jurisdictions, but its practical legal significance varied by state statute from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Several states enacted abortion statutes that replaced the quickening threshold with conception or viability standards. Researchers should not assume a uniform American rule.