Definition
A release from a debt or obligation; a document evidencing that a debt has been satisfied or a duty discharged. Quittance is functionally equivalent to acquittance and serves as a formal acknowledgment that the party who received payment or performance has no further claim against the party who provided it. The term appears most often in older conveyancing documents, bond instruments, and settlement records, where it operates as written evidence that an obligation has been extinguished.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A release or acquittal; a discharge from a debt or obligation; a document showing that discharge; also (archaic) recompense or repayment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Discharge from a debt or obligation; acquittance. Also, recompense or return (obsolete).
The common and legal meanings are close but not identical in emphasis. In ordinary historical usage, quittance could describe the act of discharging a debt or the recompense given in exchange — covering both sides of a transaction. In legal usage, quittance is narrower: it refers specifically to the release or the document recording it, from the creditor's or obligee's perspective. The obsolete sense of "repayment" has no legal counterpart and should not be imported when reading legal instruments.
Common Confusion
Quittance, acquittance, and release are frequently used interchangeably in historical documents, but carry slightly different orientations. Acquittance is the parent term; quittance is its contraction and is used synonymously. Release is the broader legal concept, which can extinguish rights beyond debt obligations. Researchers should not assume that a "quittance" in a historical deed or bond operates with precisely the same scope as a formal deed of release — the instrument's operative language controls, not the label.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a research artifact rather than a living term of art. Modern legal drafting has abandoned quittance in favor of release, discharge, or satisfaction. Researchers encountering quittance in the Law Mind corpus should treat it as a marker of older instruments — particularly pre-twentieth century bonds, conveyances, indentures, and settlement agreements — and cross-reference it against acquittance and release entries to understand the operative legal effect.
The chief trap is assuming quittance adds independent legal content. In the historical record, it almost always functions as shorthand for acquittance, itself a formal acknowledgment of payment. A document labeled a "quittance" does not necessarily carry the same evidentiary formality as a sealed deed of release; jurisdiction and the surrounding instrument matter. Researchers working with English common law sources should be alert to the distinction between a quittance as a receipt-like acknowledgment and a formal release under seal, which extinguished rights of action.
The term also appears in the compound phrase "full quittance," signaling that all obligations under a given instrument have been satisfied — a phrase worth flagging in corpus searches because it often marks the conclusion of a transaction or litigation.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries treat quittance identically: as an abbreviation or contraction of acquittance, with a cross-reference to release. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence offer no additional substantive content beyond this reduction. This unanimity is itself informative — by the time these dictionaries were compiled, quittance had no independent legal meaning that could not be resolved by consulting acquittance or release. The dictionaries implicitly acknowledge the term's derivative status by declining to define it on its own terms.
Webster's 1913 preserves the older sense of "recompense" or "return," citing Shakespeare, but none of the legal dictionaries recognize this meaning — confirming that the recompense sense was literary and obsolete by the time the legal reference works were written.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the evidentiary weight of a quittance as against a formal deed of release, or how courts treated an informal written quittance when a sealed instrument was arguably required to extinguish a right of action. Researchers needing that analysis should look beyond the dictionary record to treatises on contracts and conveyancing.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Acquittance; Release (Contracts); Discharge of Obligations.