Definition
Viduity is the state of widowhood — the condition of a person, historically most often a woman, whose spouse has died and who has not remarried. In legal contexts, viduity carried practical significance wherever rights, duties, or entitlements were conditioned on a surviving spouse remaining unmarried. Dower rights, certain testamentary conditions, annuities, and jointure arrangements were frequently structured to continue only during a widow's viduity, terminating automatically upon remarriage.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The state of being a widow; widowhood.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Widowhood. Marked as rare, with the illustrative phrase "chaste viduity" attributed to Lord Ellenborough, suggesting the word carried an added connotation of celibacy or sexual continence alongside mere marital status.
The legal gap is modest but worth noting. In ordinary usage, viduity and widowhood are interchangeable. In legal instruments, however, viduity often appeared as a precise term of limitation — "during viduity" or "so long as she remains in viduity" — where the word did specific work as a durational condition. The Webster's citation to "chaste viduity" hints at a related but distinct concept: some instruments conditioned benefits not merely on the widow's unmarried status but on her continued celibacy, a requirement courts were sometimes called upon to interpret or enforce separately from the bare fact of remarriage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter viduity in older equity and probate materials — particularly in instruments creating dower interests, life estates, annuities, or trusts with survivorship conditions. When a will or deed grants an estate or income stream "during viduity," the researcher's task is to determine what event terminates the condition: remarriage alone, or cohabitation, or some broader standard of unchaste conduct. Courts in equity occasionally addressed whether a widow who lived with a man without formal marriage had forfeited a viduity-conditioned benefit.
The word virtually disappears from American legal drafting by the late nineteenth century, replaced by plain-English phrasings such as "so long as she remains unmarried" or "during widowhood." In English ecclesiastical and chancery sources, however, viduity persists longer and may appear in materials through the Victorian period.
A secondary research trap: viduity is occasionally confused with or used alongside the concept of the "widow's quarantine" (the right of a widow to remain in the matrimonial home for a fixed period after her husband's death) or with the more substantive dower right itself. These are distinct legal concepts; viduity describes a status, not a right.
For corpus researchers, the practical value is terminological: when searching historical equity records, chancery filings, or probate instruments for conditions on spousal survivorship benefits, viduity and "during viduity" are the period-appropriate search terms. Modern equivalents in the same documents will read "during widowhood" or "so long as she shall remain unmarried."
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in complete agreement: every source — Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier — defines viduity identically as "widowhood," with no elaboration. This unanimity reflects the word's transparency as a Latinism for a well-understood concept rather than any contested legal meaning.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is the functional legal use of viduity as a term of art in drafting. The bare equivalence to "widowhood" is accurate but understates the word's practical role in instruments that imposed continuing conditions on widows' entitlements. Bouvier, in particular, might have been expected to note the connection to dower and jointure doctrine, where the duration of viduity was frequently the operative legal question. That none of the sources develop this connection suggests the drafting use was treated as self-evident to practitioners of the period.