Other forms: clauses
A clause is one numbered part of an agreement — a single rule inside a contract, a lease or a law. Clause 14 is the one about who pays for the boiler.
Lawyers stack it into set phrases: an escape clause lets you out of the deal, a penalty clause makes breaking it expensive, and a get-out clause is the everyday name for either. Grammar took the same word for a different job, where a clause is a piece of a sentence with its own subject and verb, so a long sentence can hold three or four. The two never meet: a lawyer means a numbered rule, a teacher means a chunk of a sentence. In contracts it travels with under — under clause 6, the tenant pays.
1nounclauseA separate numbered part of a contract, treaty or law.
“Clause 9 says the rent rises with inflation.”
2noungrammarIn grammar, a group of words with its own subject and verb, forming part of a sentence.
“The sentence breaks into two clauses joined by but.”
clause is a part of a legal document.
The Latin is to shut or close. A clause is one closed, self-contained part of a longer agreement, shut off from the rest of it.
hooks ontoclose
Clause traces back to Latin claudere, to shut or close, through clausus and Medieval Latin clausa; its nearest English relative is close itself. The Latin diminutive clausula meant the close of a period, the piece where a thought is shut off — which is what a clause still is, whether it closes a rule or a sentence.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kleh₂w-
Latin
clausus
Medieval Latin
clausa
Old French
clause
Middle English
clause
English, today
clause
Built from
From Middle English clause, claus, borrowed from Old French clause, from Medieval Latin clausa (Latin diminutive clausula (“close, end; a clause, close of a period”)), from Latin clausus, past participle of claudere (“to shut, close”). See close, its doublet.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA