Alienabilities

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The legal capacity to transfer ownership rights of property or assets
2. The ability to relinquish or assign rights to another party, often in a contractual context
3. The potential for rights or privileges to be sold, assigned, or otherwise ceded to others

Etymology: "Alienabilities" is simply the plural of "alienability," so the real story is the word it is built on. "Alienability" is formed from "alien," meaning to transfer or make something belong to another, plus the suffix "-ability," which turns a verb-based adjective into a noun for the quality of being able to be done. Together they name the capacity to hand property over to someone else. The base "alien" reaches English through Latin "alienare," meaning to make something belong to another, from "alienus," meaning belonging to another person. Its legal sense of transferring ownership is the older one, and the modern sense of "foreign" or "strange" grew from the same root, as "alienus" also meant "of another" in the sense of not one's own. The suffix took its shape through Latin "-abilis," which passed through Middle French "-able" into Middle English, and "-ability" arrived in English through the Latin "-abilitas," where the noun ending "-itas" was added to form words for quality or state. English then combined these pieces to produce "alienability."