Definition
Wares is a collective commercial term referring to movable goods or commodities held for sale or trade. Historically used in the compound phrase "goods, wares, and merchandise," the term functioned as one of three overlapping words intended together to capture the full range of movable chattels capable of being bought, sold, or imported. Over time, wares lost its independent legal significance and was subsumed by the broader term merchandise, which came to serve as a single equivalent for the entire traditional phrase.
In modern legal usage, wares rarely appears as a standalone term of art. It survives primarily in older statutes, commercial instruments, and trade regulations where the traditional tripartite formula was preserved, and in general commercial contexts as an informal synonym for goods or products.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of ware — goods or commodities offered for sale.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Directs to the noun ware, meaning manufactured articles, goods, or commodities of a particular kind, especially those offered for sale.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow but historically significant in one respect: in ordinary language, wares has always carried a general commercial sense. In legal usage, however, wares was a term of art within the precise phrase "goods, wares, and merchandise," where each word was understood to carry independent weight — ensuring that no category of movable chattel escaped the provision. A researcher reading the common meaning alone would miss the term's former role as a deliberate legal redundancy designed to achieve comprehensive coverage.
Common Confusion
Wares is frequently encountered alongside goods and merchandise in older legal instruments, and the three terms are often treated as interchangeable by modern readers. They were not always so. The traditional formula "goods, wares, and merchandise" was cumulative by design, with each word historically understood to reach slightly different categories of movable property. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Anderson confirms that wares had effectively merged in meaning with merchandise, and the Revised Statutes of 1873 completed this consolidation by substituting merchandise as the single term of equivalence. Researchers should not assume that the presence of wares in a pre-1873 instrument is merely decorative — courts of that era may have treated the distinctions as operative.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research challenge with wares is its near-total disappearance as a standalone legal term after the mid-nineteenth century, combined with its continued presence in older statutes and commercial documents where the phrase "goods, wares, and merchandise" was standard boilerplate.
Several navigational points are worth noting:
First, dating matters. Pre-1873 sources may treat wares as carrying independent meaning distinct from goods or merchandise. Post-1873 federal sources generally treat the terms as merged. State statutes may have followed different timelines.
Second, the tripartite formula persisted long after the distinctions collapsed. Statutes, contracts, and tariff schedules continued to use "goods, wares, and merchandise" as a unit of drafting convention well into the twentieth century, even when the individual words had lost separate content. A researcher encountering the phrase in a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century instrument should not assume it reflects any meaningful tripartite distinction — it was often pure formula.
Third, wares appears with some frequency in customs, tariff, and import-export contexts, where its historical association with importable movable chattels gave it particular traction. Researchers working in trade law or customs history should check whether the applicable statute uses wares as part of a definitional scheme or as vestigial boilerplate.
Fourth, the term connects to the broader definitional history of goods and merchandise, both of which have their own complex legal evolutions. Understanding wares requires understanding how courts and legislatures drew (and eventually stopped drawing) lines among movable chattels.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides the essential account: wares held the same meaning as merchandise up to the mid-nineteenth century and was one component of the standard cumulative phrase "goods, wares, and merchandise," which was understood to include all movable chattels, particularly those capable of being imported. Anderson notes the Revised Statutes of 1873 as the consolidating moment, when merchandise was formally substituted as the equivalent for the whole phrase.
Anderson's entry is brief, and notably directs researchers outward to GOODS and MERCHANDISE for the fuller treatment — an implicit acknowledgment that wares does not sustain independent doctrinal analysis by that period. What Anderson does not address is any pre-consolidation case law that may have turned on the distinction between wares and the companion terms, nor does it survey state-level statutory treatment, which may have diverged from the federal pattern.
No other source dictionaries in the current corpus provide a separate entry for wares. This absence itself is informative: by the time most legal dictionaries were compiled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wares had receded far enough from independent legal significance that compilers either omitted it or folded it into the goods and merchandise entries.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal treatment consolidated wares into merchandise by 1873. State statutes varied in their adoption of the same consolidation, and some states continued to use the tripartite formula "goods, wares, and merchandise" in commercial and criminal codes long after the federal change. Researchers working with state materials should check the applicable state's own definitional provisions rather than assuming federal consolidation applies.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — GOODS AND MERCHANDISE
Law Mind Encyclopedia — PERSONAL PROPERTY (MOVABLE CHATTELS)