Ordinary Meaning
Definition
The meaning a reasonable person with ordinary linguistic competence would assign to a word or phrase. It is the default canon of statutory interpretation in most common-law jurisdictions: courts begin with ordinary meaning and depart from it only if the text is technical, ambiguous, or if ordinary meaning produces an absurd result.
- Field
- Statutory and contract interpretation
- Default rule
- Applied before technical or purposive readings
- Departure allowed when
- Text is technical, ambiguous, or produces absurd result
- Related role
- Forensic linguist as expert witness
Common questions
When would a court depart from the ordinary meaning of a word in a statute or contract?+
Courts move away from ordinary meaning when the term is a recognised technical term of art within a trade or profession, when the ordinary reading is genuinely ambiguous between two senses, or when applying it literally would produce a result plainly at odds with the evident purpose of the text.
What role does a forensic linguist play in disputes over ordinary meaning?+
A forensic linguist can testify about how a word or phrase was actually used and understood by the relevant speech community at the relevant time, drawing on corpus data and usage evidence, which helps the court avoid substituting its own intuition for how the term was genuinely understood.
Related terms
- Concordance
- A list of all occurrences of a target word in a corpus, shown in their surrounding context (KWIC: keyword in context). Concordance...
- Corpus Jurisprudence
- The practice of using corpus analysis as evidence in statutory or constitutional interpretation. Associated in the US with Brigham Young University's Law...
- Corpus Linguistics
- The study of language through large, principled collections of texts or transcripts. In forensic work, corpus methods are used to count how...
- New Originalism
- A US constitutional and statutory interpretation theory associated with scholars including Antonin Scalia, Randy Barnett, and Jack Balkin, holding that courts should...
- Syntactic Ambiguity
- Ambiguity arising from the grammatical structure of a sentence rather than from any individual word's meaning. The Oxford comma case is a...