Meanings
- Pertaining to proprietarians or proprietarianism (in colonial North America).
In Charleston, the aftermath of the Yamassee War was one of reorganization, regulation and a massive political shift as the colony moved from proprietarial control to become a royal colony.
2015, Timothy Paul Grady, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in Colonial South-East America, 1650–1725, Routledge, →ISBN, page 140 - uncommonProprietary or proprietorial; pertaining to property or ownership (of property).
1 more example
They extended the proprietarial and contractual provisions of emerging commercial law to seize local peasant debtors as slaves, [...] ‘Proprietarial’ interests in both outsiders and local debtors, commercialized for purposes of negotiability, thus appeared several millennia ago in Mesopotamia. However, to construe these atypical transactions [...] as defining of ‘slavery’, would then indulge the selective fallacy of origins — in relation to modern thoroughly proprietarial slavery [...]
2008, Enrico Dal Lago, Constantina Katsari, Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 76
Origin
Perhaps proprietary + -al influenced by proprietorial, or perhaps a variant of the latter influenced by the former.
Full word history & related roots →Rhymes & wordplay
Rhymes with proprietarial
Cite this entry
proprietarial. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/proprietarial
“proprietarial.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/proprietarial. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “proprietarial,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/proprietarial.
Source: proprietarial on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.