Definition
In old English records, a field or open tract of land. The term appears in historical legal documents, surveys, and land records derived from the Old English (Saxon) tradition, where it denoted an area of cultivated or open ground, typically associated with agricultural holdings. It is not a term of modern law and carries no current operative legal meaning.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In the game of pai gow, a hand in which the double-one or double-six domino is used with a nine, making the hand worth eleven points rather than the usual one.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A field. [Obs.] Spelman. 'Woods and wonges.' Havelok the Dane."
The legal and common meanings here converge historically — both point to the same obsolete English word for a field — but the modern common usage (a pai gow hand) is entirely unrelated. A researcher encountering "wong" in an old English land record is dealing with the archaic Anglo-Saxon term for a field, not any modern usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are unlikely to encounter "wong" as a stand-alone legal term in any modern context. Its significance in Law Mind is almost entirely historical: it may appear in transcriptions of medieval English land surveys, manorial records, or early colonial documents that drew on English conveyancing traditions. Misreading or failing to recognize the term in such documents could lead to confusion about the nature or boundaries of a described parcel.
More practically, researchers working in Law Mind who search for "Wong" will surface materials under two significant proper names in American legal history, neither of which is related to this dictionary entry: United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the landmark Fourteenth Amendment birthright citizenship case, and Wong Sun v. United States, the foundational Fourth Amendment case establishing the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine as applied to statements and evidence obtained following unlawful arrests. Researchers should be aware that a corpus search on "Wong" will return results across these entirely distinct legal domains.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: wong is a Saxon term appearing in old records, signifying a field, with Spelman and Cowell cited as authority. Neither edition elaborates further, reflecting the term's purely antiquarian status even at the time of Black's compilation. The Webster's 1913 entry confirms the obsolescence of the common word and supplies the literary citation from Havelok the Dane ("woods and wonges"), a Middle English romance, which corroborates the term's medieval English provenance. No modern legal dictionary treats "wong" as a live term of art. The historical dictionaries provide all the coverage the term requires.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Birthright Citizenship — The Fourteenth Amendment and United States v. Wong Kim Ark (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)
Exclusionary Rule and Fruit of the Poisonous Tree (Mapp, Wong Sun) (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)