stellionate

English

Etymology

From Latin stellionatus (“cozenage, trickery”), from stellio (“a newt, a crafty, knavish person”).

Noun

stellionate (plural stellionates)

  1. (law, Scotland, Ancient Rome) Any fraud not distinguished by a more special name; chiefly applied to sales of the same property to two different persons, or selling that for one's own which belongs to another, etc.
    (Can we find and add a quotation of Erskine to this entry?)

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for stellionate in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.