Word.ws English Dictionary

defendaunt

defendaunt is the obsolete form of defendant.

Meaning of defendant

Noun

defendant (plural defendants)

  1. In civil proceedings, the party responding to the complaint; one who is sued and called upon to make satisfaction for a wrong complained of by another.
    • 404(b)—including a series of domestic abuse incidents defendant perpetrated against victim, a PFA against defendant by victim, and other third-party PFAs entered against defendant to protect other women—as well as evidence from[…]2019 November 29, Daniel J. Anders, Bobby Ochoa III, Ohlbaum on the Pennsylvania Rules of Evidence, LexisNexis, →ISBN
    Synonyms:
    respondent
  2. In criminal proceedings, the accused.
    • Unintended mathwashing occurs when the algorithm is left unchecked, and, learning from historical data, amplifies social bias. The U.S. justice system uses an algorithm called COMPAS to determine a criminal's likelihood to re-offend. COMPAS has been proven by Pro Publica to predict that black...2018 January 29, Sophie Kleber, “As AI Meets the Reputation Economy, We're All Being Silently Judged”, in Harvard Business Review, Brighton, M.A.: Harvard Business Publishing, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived...

See all 3 meanings of defendant

Forms of defendaunt

pluraldefendaunts

Questions about defendaunt

What is defendaunt the obsolete form of?
Defendaunt is the obsolete form of defendant.

Words near defendaunt in the dictionary

  1. defendability
  2. defendable
  3. defendably
  4. defendant
  5. defendants
  6. defendaunt
  7. defendaunts
  8. defended
  9. defendedst
  10. defendee
  11. defendees

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: defendaunt (page history and authors); defendant (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “defendaunt.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/defendaunt. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.