Entail
King James Dictionary [1]
ENTA'IL, n.
1. An estate or fee entailed, or limited indescent to a particular heir or heirs. Estates-tail are general, as when lands and tenements are given to one and the heirs of his body begotten or special, as when lands and tenements are given to one and the heirs of his body by a particular wife. 2. Rule of descent settled for an estate. 3. Engraver's work inlay.
ENTA'IL, To settle the descent of lands and tenements, by gift to a man and to certain heirs specified, so that neither the donee nor any subsequent possessor can alienate or bequeath it as, to entail a manor to AB and to his eldest son, or to his heirs of his body begotten, or to his heirs by a particular wife.
1. To fix unalienably on a person or thing, or on a person and his descendants. By the apostasy misery is supposed to be entailed on mankind. The intemperate often entail infirmities, diseases and ruin on their children. 2. from the French verb. To cut to carve for ornament.
Webster's Dictionary [2]
(1): ( n.) Delicately carved ornamental work; intaglio.
(2): ( n.) To cut or carve in a ornamental way.
(3): ( n.) To appoint hereditary possessor.
(4): ( n.) To settle or fix inalienably on a person or thing, or on a person and his descendants or a certain line of descendants; - said especially of an estate; to bestow as an heritage.
(5): ( n.) An estate in fee entailed, or limited in descent to a particular class of issue.
(6): ( n.) That which is entailed.
(7): ( n.) The rule by which the descent is fixed.
The Nuttall Encyclopedia [3]
A term in law which came to be used in connection with the practice of limiting the inheritance of estates to a certain restricted line of heirs. Attempts of the kind, which arise naturally out of the deeply-seated desire which men have to preserve property—especially landed estates—in their own families, are of ancient date; but the system as understood now, involving the principle of primogeniture, owes its origin to the feudal system. Sometimes the succession was limited to the male issue, but this was by no means an invariable practice; in modern times the system has been, by a succession of Acts of Parliaments (notably the Cairns Act of 1882), greatly modified, and greater powers given to the actual owner of alienating the estates to which he has succeeded, a process which is called "breaking the entail."
