Other forms: entails, entailed, entailing
If something entails something else, that second thing comes with it whether you want it or not. Taking the job entails moving to another city. A puppy entails early mornings in the rain.
Entail is the word for laying out what is really involved: what does the course entail, what will the repairs entail, what does the role entail. It is formal and a little dry — at home in reports, contracts and job adverts rather than in conversation, where people say involve or mean. After it comes a noun or an -ing form, never an infinitive: the work entails travel, the work entails travelling, but not the work entails to travel. Logic uses it strictly, one statement entailing another. And in old property law you could entail an estate, tying it to a single line of heirs so that no owner could ever sell it — the arrangement half of Jane Austen's plots hang on.
1verbentailTo have something as a necessary part or a necessary result.~82%
“The new rules entail a great deal of extra paperwork.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
2verblogicIn logic, to make another statement necessarily true.~10%
“If every bird has feathers, being a bird entails having feathers.”
3verblawIn law, to settle property on a fixed line of heirs so that it cannot be sold or given away.~3%
“The estate was entailed on the nearest male relative.”
4nounarrangementThat legal arrangement itself.~5%
“Breaking the entail took years and a great deal of money.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 95 sentences found in the wild and placed 95 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: involve, require
en-TAIL → a TAIL
You buy one small dog at the market and carry it home in a box. The tail does not fit. It hangs over the edge, drags down the stairs behind you, and is still out in the street when you reach your door. One dog, and all of that tail comes with it.
hooks ontotail
Old French entailler meant to notch — literally to cut in, from tailler, to cut. A fee entailed was a fee cut down: an estate carved so narrowly that only one line of heirs could take it, and no owner could sell it on. The cutting never left. What a job entails is what has been cut into the shape of it, and cannot be trimmed off.
Latin
taliare
Old French
entaillier
Middle English
entaillen
English, today
entail
Built from
From Middle English entaillen, from Old French entaillier, entailler (“to notch”) literally “to cut in”; from prefix en- + tailler (“to cut”), from Latin taliare, from Latin talea. Compare late Latin feudum talliatum (“a fee entailed, i.e., curtailed or limited”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA