Definition
In legal usage, tick means credit extended to a buyer at the time of purchase, particularly for goods obtained on informal trust without immediate payment. The term appears most commonly in older contract and agency cases where the question is whether a principal is bound by credit extended to a servant or agent who purchased goods "on tick" — that is, on the master's account without explicit authorization for that transaction.
The legal significance of tick is almost entirely historical. It does not describe a formal legal instrument or structured credit arrangement; it describes the informal, trust-based extension of credit that characterized much retail trade in earlier centuries, and courts used it when analyzing whether such informal credit dealings could bind a principal.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In contemporary ordinary English, tick carries a range of meanings — a sharp repetitive mechanical sound, a unit of time or measurement, a mark on a scale, and in gaming contexts, a periodic increment of effect. Credit or trust is not among its current primary meanings.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Credit; trust; as, to buy on, or upon, tick."
The gap between the common and legal meaning runs in the opposite direction from most such entries. The legal dictionaries preserve a meaning of tick that was already colloquial in its era and has since dropped almost entirely from ordinary English usage. A researcher encountering the word in a modern context would have no reason to suspect a financial or agency-law meaning. The legal use is a fossil of commercial vernacular that survived into case reporters and dictionaries long after the word shed that meaning in everyday speech.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter tick almost exclusively in historical sources — English common law cases, early American commercial law decisions, and agency law treatises from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The term is a reliable signal that the surrounding text concerns informal credit extension, often in the context of a servant-principal or agent-principal relationship and the question of apparent or implied authority.
The primary research trap is anachronism: a researcher unfamiliar with the historical commercial meaning may skip over tick as casual language without recognizing it as a legal term of art identifying the credit arrangement at the center of the dispute. Bouvier's illustration makes the doctrinal stakes clear — when a servant routinely purchases on the master's credit and the tradesperson has extended trust to the master in the past, a single unauthorized purchase may still bind the master.
Tick does not appear in modern statutory schemes or contemporary case law as a legal term. Its value is strictly as an interpretive key for historical sources. Researchers working in agency law history, early commercial law, or the development of apparent authority doctrine will find it recurring without definition in the primary sources, making the dictionary entries essential context.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources are in agreement: tick means credit or trust extended at the point of sale. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) offer identical minimal entries, flagging the term as colloquial and defining it as credit given for goods purchased. Bouvier adds the most substantively useful entry by embedding the term in a concrete doctrinal example drawn from reported authority (Keble and Modern Reports), illustrating how the concept functioned in agency analysis.
The consistency across sources reflects the term's narrow, stable meaning in legal usage — it never developed competing definitions or jurisdictional variation. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the word's gradual disappearance from legal usage as commercial credit became formalized through instruments, accounts, and eventually consumer credit statutes. None of the three sources hints at any statutory treatment, because tick belonged to the common law of informal dealings rather than to any regulatory framework.
Jurisdictional Note
Tick as a legal term appears primarily in English common law sources and early American cases drawing on that tradition. It does not appear to have developed distinct meanings across American jurisdictions, likely because its use was already declining as commercial practice became more formalized before American case law had occasion to treat it independently.