Cover not available
Part of
Handbook of Terminology: Volume 3. Legal Terminology
Edited by Łucja Biel and Hendrik J. Kockaert
[Handbook of Terminology 3] 2023
► pp. 72–89

Ordinary meaning in common law legal interpretation

| Independent scholar

Judges in the United States frequently appeal to the concept of “ordinary meaning” when tasked with interpreting legal texts. Yet U.S. judges lack a shared, coherent definition of what “ordinary meaning” actually means and they lack a shared, coherent method for discovering “ordinary meaning”. This chapter addresses some of the ways that U.S. judges characterize “ordinary meaning”. It also discusses how judges go about searching for “ordinary meaning.” The chapter also proposes that legal interpreters should place more reliance in usage evidence when tasked with interpreting a legal text and finding its “ordinary meaning”.

Keywords: dictionaries, ordinary meaning, legal interpretation, statutory interpretation, contract interpretation
Article outline
  • 1.Why ordinary meaning?
  • 2.What is ordinary meaning?
    • 2.1Context, speech community, and timeframe
      • Linguistic context
      • Timeframe
      • Ordinary meaning and speech community
  • 3.Finding ordinary meaning
    • 3.1Linguistic intuition
    • 3.2Dictionaries and the “Baffled Judge”
  • 4.Evaluating ordinary meaning claims with linguistic corpora
  • 5.Limitations and future work
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC BY-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 December 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hot.3.ord1
References (51)
Agirre, Eneko and Phillip Edmonds
2007 Word Sense Disambiguation: Algorithms and Application. Chambersburg, PA: Springer.Google Scholar
American Law Institute
1973 Restatement of the Law, Second: Contracts 2d. § 212 cmt. b. St. Paul, MN: American Law Institute Publishers.Google Scholar
Bedi, Suneal and David Reibstein
2020 “Measuring Trademark Dilution by Tarnishment.” Indiana Law Journal 95:683–734.Google Scholar
Ben-Shahar, Omri and Lior J. Strahilevitz
2017 “Interpreting Contracts Via Surveys and Experiments.” New York University Law Review. 92:1753–1827. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas and Randi Reppen
2015 The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Randi Reppen
1998 Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Keith and Keith Allan
2009 Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics. Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Brudney, James J. and Lawrence Baum
2013 “Oasis or Mirage: The Supreme Court’s Thirst for Dictionaries in the Rehnquist and Roberts Eras.” William & Mary Law Review 55:483–580. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1957 Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corbin, Arthur L.
1952 Corbin on Contracts. One Volume Edition. St. Paul, Minn.: West.Google Scholar
Crossley, Scott, Tom Salsbury, and Danielle McNamara
2010 “The Development of Polysemy and Frequency Use in English Second Language Speakers.” Language Learning. A Journal of Research in Language Studies 60:573–605. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crowley, Terry and Claire Bowern
2011 An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Duranti, Alessandro and Charles Goodwin
1992 “Rethinking Context: An Introduction.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, edited by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Eskridge Jr., William S.
1987 “Dynamic Statutory Interpretation.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 135:1479–1555. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Interpreting Law: A Primer on How to Read Statutes and the Constitution. St. Paul, MN: Foundation Press.Google Scholar
Eysenck, Michael W.
2001 Principles of Cognitive Psychology. London: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Fallon Jr., Richard
2019 “The Statutory Interpretation Muddle.” Northwestern University Law Review 114:269–334.Google Scholar
Farnsworth, Ward, Dustin F. Guzior, and Anup Malani
2010 “Ambiguity About Ambiguity: An Empirical Inquiry into Legal Interpretation.” Journal of Legal Analysis 2:257–300. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Galotti, Kathleen M.
2009 Cognitive Psychology: In and Out of the Laboratory. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Garner, Bryan A.
ed. 2014 Black’s Law Dictionary. 10th ed. St. Paul, MN: West.Google Scholar
Goldfarb, Neal
2017 “A Lawyer’s Introduction to Meaning in the Framework of Corpus Linguistics.” Brigham Young University Law Review 6:1359–1417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gove, Philip Babcock
1971 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Company.Google Scholar
Gumperz, J. J.
1968 “The Speech Community.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton, 381–386. New York, NY: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hart, Henry M. and Albert M. Sacks
1994 The Legal Process: Basic Problems in the Making and the Application of Law, edited by William N. Eskridge Jr. and Philip P. Frickey. St. Paul, MN: Foundation Press.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Craig
2003 “Parse the Sentence First: Curbing the Urge to Resort to the Dictionary when Interpreting Legal Texts.” New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy 6:401–438.Google Scholar
Jennejohn, Matthew, Samuel Nelson, and D. Carolina Núñez
2021 “Hidden Bias in Empirical Textualism.” Georgetown Law Journal 109:767–811.Google Scholar
Landau, Sidney I.
2001 Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lee, Thomas R. and Stephen C. Mouritsen
2018 “Judging Ordinary Meaning.” Yale Law Journal 12(4):788–879.Google Scholar
Lyons, John
1968 Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McEnery, Tony and Andrew Wilson
2011 Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McEnery, Tony and Andrew Hardie
2012 Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McEnery, Tony, Helen Samantha Baker, and Carmen Dayrell
2020 “Working at the Interface of Hydrology and Corpus Linguistics.” In Using Corpus Methods to Triangulate Linguistic Analysis, edited by Jesse Egbert and Paul Baker, 52–84. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
McGowan, Miranda
2008 “Do as I Do, Not as I Say: An Empirical Investigation of Justice Scalia’s Ordinary Meaning Method of Statutory Interpretation.” Mississippi Law Journal 78:129–198. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Marcyliena H.
2014 Speech Communities: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morris, Michael
2006 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mouritsen, Stephen
2010 “The Dictionary Is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning.” BYU Law Review 5:1915–1980.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary
1989 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Reed, Jr., Joseph W.
1962 “Noah Webster’s Debt to Samuel Johnson.” American Speech 37:95–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saeed, John I.
2015 Semantics. 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Shilling, Natalie
2014 “Surveys and Interviews.” In Research Methods in Linguistics, edited by Robert J. Podesva and Devyani Sharma, 96–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sihler, Andrew L.
2000 Language History: An Introduction. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Solan, Lawrence
1993 “When Judges Use the Dictionary.” American Speech 68(1):50–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Solan, Lawrence M. and Tammy Gales
2017 “Corpus Linguistics as a Tool in Legal Interpretation.” Brigham Young University Law Review 2017:1311–1358.Google Scholar
Solan, Lawrence, Terri Rosenblatt, and Daniel Osherson
2008 “False Consensus Bias in Contract Interpretation.” Columbia Law Review 108:1268–1300.Google Scholar
Solum, Lawrence B.
2015 “The Fixation Thesis: The Role of Historical Fact in Original Meaning.” Notre Dame Law Review 91(1): 1–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sonpal, Rickie
2003 “Old Dictionaries and New Textualists.” Fordham Law Review 71:2177–2226.Google Scholar
Taylor, James R.
2016 “Cognitive Linguistics.” In Routledge Handbook of Linguistics, edited by Keith Allan, 455–469. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tobia, Kevin P.
2020 “Testing Ordinary Meaning.” Harvard Law Review 134:726–806.Google Scholar
Tsatsornis, George, Iraklis Varlamis, and Kjetil Nørvåg
2010 “An Experimental Study on Unsupervised Graph-based Word Sense Disambiguation.” Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, edited by Alexander Gulbukh, 184–198. Chambersburg, PA: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
1961 3rd ed. Springfield: Merriam Webster.Google Scholar
White, James J.
1995 Uniform Commercial Code. St. Paul, Minn.: West.Google Scholar