Definition
WIND as a standalone legal term of art is narrow and context-dependent. It appears in legal sources primarily in two distinct settings:
1. Natural phenomenon (property, maritime, and tort law). Wind as atmospheric air in motion is legally significant in contexts involving weather-related damage, insurance coverage, easements, nuisance, and maritime peril. As a physical force, wind defines and limits liability — particularly in insurance disputes over whether damage resulted from wind, water, or their combination — and appears in the law of natural forces bearing on negligence and strict liability.
2. "Wind up" / "winding up" (business entity law). The verb form — to wind, as in to wind up — is the far more common legal usage. Winding up refers to the process of settling a dissolved business entity's affairs: collecting and liquidating assets, satisfying creditor claims, and distributing any remainder to members, partners, or shareholders before the entity is formally terminated. The term applies across entity types, including corporations, general partnerships, limited partnerships, and LLCs.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Real or perceived movement of atmospheric air, usually caused by convection or differences in air pressure; also used figuratively to mean a trend, rumor, or tendency.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To turn completely or with repeated turns; to coil or twine about something fixed; also, to have complete control over.
The gap matters for researchers in two directions. First, the atmospheric meaning of wind in legal texts is narrower and more technical than ordinary usage — legal disputes focus on wind as a defined peril or causal agent, not merely weather. Second, and more significantly, the verbal form "to wind" in legal writing almost never means to coil or twine; it is a compressed form of "to wind up," carrying the specific procedural meaning of dissolving and settling an entity's affairs. A researcher encountering "wind" in a business law context should read it as shorthand for that dissolution process, not as a physical or directional term.
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Common Confusion
Wind (atmospheric) vs. wind up (entity dissolution): These share a spelling and a source word but operate in entirely separate legal domains. Context resolves the ambiguity in most cases, but historical documents may use the verb form without "up," which can momentarily mislead.
Wind vs. water (insurance/maritime): In property insurance and maritime law, the distinction between wind damage and water damage is often dispositive. Policies frequently cover one but not the other, and the two forces commonly act together in storm events, generating substantial litigation over causation and coverage. "Wind and water" as a combined phrase has its own legal significance — see Anderson's entry directing to WEAR AND TEAR — and should not be read as redundant.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter WIND across starkly different bodies of law, and conflating those contexts will send a search in the wrong direction.
In business entity law, "winding up" is a term of art with a defined sequence of steps and legal consequences. The corpus encyclopedia entries on dissolution of LLCs, general partnerships, and limited partnerships each treat winding up as a distinct phase — separate from the vote or event that triggers dissolution and separate from the final termination filing. Researchers tracing a question about creditor priority, asset distribution, or member liability during dissolution should follow the winding-up entries directly. Searching for "wind" alone may retrieve atmospheric law materials that are irrelevant.
In property and insurance law, wind as a natural force is deeply entangled with questions of concurrent causation. The wind/water problem is one of the most litigated insurance coverage issues following major storm events. Historical sources — particularly marine insurance and early property insurance treatises — treat wind as a listed peril, and the precise language of enumerated-peril versus all-risk policies changes how wind damage is analyzed. Anderson's cross-reference to DANGERS and TEMPEST signals that historical sources categorized wind damage under storm and weather perils rather than giving wind its own doctrine.
Anderson's own entry is a redirect, which tells researchers something: as of the late nineteenth century, wind had not yet generated a standalone legal doctrine. Its doctrinal weight accumulated largely in the twentieth century through insurance coverage litigation.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law dispenses with WIND in a single line, pointing researchers to DANGERS and TEMPEST for wind's role as a maritime and weather peril, and to WEAR AND TEAR for the combined "wind and water" phrase. This brevity is itself informative. Nineteenth-century legal dictionaries did not treat wind as a term requiring independent definition — it was absorbed into the law of perils, which was the organizing framework for both maritime and early property insurance.
The historical sources are silent on "winding up" under this headword, reflecting the fact that by the time Anderson wrote, winding up was already a sufficiently established phrase in partnership and corporate dissolution law that it appeared under its own entries (WINDING UP, DISSOLUTION) rather than under WIND. Researchers using historical dictionaries should look for those dedicated entries rather than expecting the base word to carry the dissolution meaning.
What historical sources collectively miss is the twentieth-century emergence of wind as a standalone causation category in property insurance — the wind/water distinction that drives modern storm coverage litigation is largely a post-Anderson development, shaped by standardized policy forms and catastrophic weather events.
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Jurisdictional Note
Winding-up procedures vary by entity type and state statute. Some states use "winding up" and "dissolution" interchangeably in their LLC and partnership acts; others sharply distinguish the triggering event (dissolution) from the settlement process (winding up). Researchers should identify which phase a dispute involves before locating the applicable statutory provision.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
LLCs — Dissolution and Winding Up of LLCs (The Law Mind Business Organizations & Corporate Law Encyclopedia)
General Partnerships — Dissolution, Winding Up, and Termination of Partnerships (The Law Mind Business Organizations & Corporate Law Encyclopedia)
Limited Partnerships — Dissolution and Winding Up of Limited Partnerships (The Law Mind Business Organizations & Corporate Law Encyclopedia)
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