Entailers

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person or thing that involves or necessitates something else as a necessary condition
2. An individual or entity that brings about certain consequences or requirements in a particular situation
3. Someone or something that is responsible for deriving certain obligations or implications from a specific context

Etymology: "Entailers" is the plural of "entailer," formed by adding the agentive suffix "-er" to "entail." The base verb "entail" comes from the Middle English "entailen," which combined the prefix "en-" (to put into or make) with "taile," meaning a limitation or cutting, as in the "tailed" fee in property law. An entail was a legal arrangement that restricted the inheritance of an estate to a specified line of heirs, so the tie between the verb's sense of binding something in place and its present-day logical meaning is a direct one. The extension to logic came as the sense of necessary consequence, "to involve as a result," grew out of that binding idea: a premise that locks in a conclusion is, in effect, an entail. An entailer, then, is whatever does the locking in, whether a rule, a statement, or a context that forces certain implications to follow.

Synonyms: includers, inheritors, bequeathers, imposers, assigners