"possession is nine points of the law" meaning in English

See possession is nine points of the law in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Proverb

Etymology: Unknown. Presumably derives from legal principle where the satisfaction of 10 (or at times 12) points legitimated ownership; hence “nine points of the law” (sometimes “eleven points of the law”) constituted close to full ownership. Derived from the early English property system, where the right to possession of property was endorsed by the king in the form of a writ. There were nine traditional writs granted by the King, and each of these nine writs represented the nine basic rights of property possession. These nine writs evolved into the nine original laws defining property ownership, hence the expression "possession is nine points in the law." Listed in the form “Possession is nine points in the Law.” as a common saying in 1616 by Thomas Draxe, Adages 163. Etymology templates: {{unk|en}} Unknown Head templates: {{head|en|proverb|head=possession is nine points of the law}} possession is nine points of the law
  1. Dated form of possession is nine-tenths of the law. Tags: alt-of, dated Alternative form of: possession is nine-tenths of the law
    Sense id: en-possession_is_nine_points_of_the_law-en-proverb-lxPzF68T Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English proverbs

Download JSON data for possession is nine points of the law meaning in English (1.7kB)

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-30 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (210104c and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.