Blackacre, Whiteacre, and Greenacre are legal placeholder names for imaginary parcels of land, the real-estate cousins of doohickey and whatchamacallit. Lawyers and law students use them in hypotheticals about land transfers, taxes, and other property-law problems, without dragging a real owner or company into the example. The common form Blackacre is written as one word, with acre meaning a piece of land. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Blackacre” Is a Fictitious Plot of Land in Real Estate Law”
English has a lot of placeholder words like doohickey or thingamabob or the whatchamacallit.
But it turns out in law, real estate law in particular, there’s a fictitious company name that they use. Several of them, the variations are Black Acre, White Acre, Green Acre, Brown Acre.
And all of these are stand-in names so that when they’re discussing a hypothetical case or the way a bit of law might go or just really discussing how these things are handled when you’re transferring land or there are taxes involved and all the problems, you can just throw that in as your generic company name.
So you will do this whole class about Black Acre, but use that as your way you develop your legal talents. Interesting. Without having to use a real company’s name.
Okay, so black acre, all one word. Yeah, all one word. Acre, like A-C-R-E. Like a piece of land, yeah. Cool.
If there’s a placeholder in your field, when you don’t really know what to talk about or you don’t want to name the thing that you’re talking about, tell us what it is, 877-929-9673. Or email words@waywordradio.org.
