Proprietarial
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Pertaining to proprietarians or proprietarianism (in colonial North America).
"In Charleston, the aftermath of the Yamassee War was one of reorganization, regulation and a massive political shift as the colony moved from proprietarial control to become a royal colony."
- 2 Proprietary or proprietorial; pertaining to property or ownership (of property). uncommon
"They extended the proprietarial and contractual provisions of emerging commercial law to seize local peasant debtors as slaves, [...] ‘Proprietarial’ interests in both outsiders and local debtors, commercialized for purposes of negotiability, thus appeared several millennia ago in Mesopotamia. However, to construe these atypical transactions [...] as defining of ‘slavery’, would then indulge the selective fallacy of origins — in relation to modern thoroughly proprietarial slavery [...]"
Example
More examples"In Charleston, the aftermath of the Yamassee War was one of reorganization, regulation and a massive political shift as the colony moved from proprietarial control to become a royal colony."
Etymology
Perhaps proprietary + -al influenced by proprietorial, or perhaps a variant of the latter influenced by the former.
Related phrases
More for "proprietarial"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.