Bob, To put it more succinctly: Legal terms tend to persist in legal documents long after the word is no part of the common vocabulary AND long after the reason for using the term has lost its legal validity. Black's Legal Dictionary includes archaic terms such as intermarriage. I believe that Black's said, in 1951, that it was "sometimes used" because it was a term that was nearing the end of the following-out-of-usage process and was not "always used" or "often used". It was "often used" in the time period inquired about [1800-1860] and would have had a strict legal meaning, and therefore "always used" with a precise legal meaning probably 200 years before that. This is my [pretty well] educated guess, to answer another of your questions. And by the way, "inter" is Latin, a demonstration of one of the marvels of our language: we can easily combine words of entirely different origins and create new meanings, one of the great benefits, in the past, of studying Latin. Joan Best "Joan Best" <joanbest@earthlink.net>