Definition
A Law French term meaning "to determine." TERMINER does not function as a standalone legal concept; it exists almost exclusively as the second element of the compound phrase OYER AND TERMINER — the commission or court empowered to hear and determine criminal matters. Standing alone, TERMINER simply denotes the act of judicial determination or resolution of a matter.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of determining.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A determining; as, in oyer and terminer.
Both common definitions capture the term's literal meaning accurately. The gap is not between common and legal meaning — they align — but between the term's apparent breadth and its actual narrow function. In legal usage, TERMINER is not a general word for any act of determination; it is effectively a technical fossil, preserved only inside the fixed phrase OYER AND TERMINER and carrying no operative legal meaning outside that compound.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will rarely encounter TERMINER in isolation. Its appearance in historical legal documents virtually always signals a reference to an OYER AND TERMINER commission or court, and the entry should be read in that context. When scanning colonial-era, early American, or English legal records and encountering the standalone word, treat it as an abbreviated reference to that broader institution rather than an independent term of art.
The practical research trap: indexes and digests from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sometimes list case references or statutory provisions under TERMINER separately from OYER AND TERMINER. A researcher who searches only one entry may miss relevant material filed under the other. Check both headings in any historical digest or index.
The term is also relevant for understanding Law French's influence on common-law vocabulary. Many Law French words survived in English legal usage only as components of fixed phrases; TERMINER is a clean example of this pattern. Understanding its literal meaning — "to determine" — helps researchers parse other archaic compound commissions and writs where the same root appears or is implied.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries are in complete agreement: TERMINER means "to determine" and is treated solely as a component of OYER AND TERMINER. None of the sources assigns TERMINER an independent doctrinal meaning or treats it as a freestanding term of art.
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the most instructive of the group, quoting directly from Britton (the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise): "A oyer et terminer toutes quereles" — "to hear and determine all complaints." This citation grounds the term in its earliest English common-law context and confirms that even in medieval usage, TERMINER operated as part of a paired formula rather than independently. Burrill also notes the Latin root terminare, connecting the Law French form to its classical antecedent and illustrating the linguistic path by which the term entered English legal practice.
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence simply cross-reference OYER AND TERMINER without elaboration, which accurately reflects the term's function: it has no content of its own worth elaborating apart from that parent entry. Anderson's takes the same approach. The consensus across all historical sources is unusual in its uniformity — there is no meaningful divergence to flag, and no historical source overclaims or misrepresents the term's scope.
What the historical sources do not address is the gradual obsolescence of the oyer and terminer commission in American jurisdictions and the transformation of the associated courts into modern criminal trial courts of general jurisdiction. Researchers working with post-nineteenth-century American materials should be alert to the possibility that a reference to an "oyer and terminer court" may describe a body with a formal name but a modernized procedural structure quite different from the English commission model.