Skip to content
OneKitly

charter

nounadjectiveverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈt͡ʃɑːtə//
  • United States//ˈt͡ʃɑɹtɚ//

A document issued by some authority, creating a public or private institution, and defining its purposes and privileges.

noun

  1. 1

    A document issued by some authority, creating a public or private institution, and defining its purposes and privileges.

  2. 2

    A similar document conferring rights and privileges on a person, corporation etc.

  3. 3

    A contract for the commercial leasing of a vessel, or space on a vessel.

  4. 4

    The temporary hiring or leasing of a vehicle.

  5. 5

    A deed (legal contract).

  6. 6

    A special privilege, immunity, or exemption.

    My mother, / Who has a charter to extol her blood, / When she does praise me, grieves me.

  7. 7

    a provision whose unintended consequence would be to encourage an undesirable activity

    In what Derbyshire police say amounts to a "thieves' charter," three judges ruled that because the car's identity had been changed it was impossible to trace the legal owner and therefore the person found in possession of it was entitled to keep it.

    [object Object]

Etymology

From Middle English charter, chartre, borrowed from Old French chartre, from Latin chartula (diminutive of charta). See chart. Doublet of chartula.

adjective

  1. 1

    Leased or hired.

verb

  1. 1

    To grant or establish a charter.

  2. 2

    To lease or hire something by charter.

  3. 3

    (of a peace officer) To inform (an arrestee) of their constitutional rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms upon arrest.

Forms

plural
charters
past tense
chartered
past participle
chartered
present participle
chartering
third person singular
charters
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).