Word.ws English Dictionary

doctrine of equivalents

doctrine of equivalents noun: a legal rule in most patent systems that allows a court to hold a party liable for patent infringement when the infringing device or process does not fall within the literal scope of a patent claim, but nevertheless is equivalent to the claimed invention.

Noun

doctrine of equivalents

  1. (US) A legal rule in most patent systems that allows a court to hold a party liable for patent infringement when the infringing device or process does not fall within the literal scope of a patent claim, but nevertheless is equivalent to the claimed invention.

Questions about doctrine of equivalents

What does doctrine of equivalents mean?
Doctrine of equivalents means a legal rule in most patent systems that allows a court to hold a party liable for patent infringement when the infringing device or process does not fall within the literal scope of a patent claim, but nevertheless is equivalent to the claimed invention.
What part of speech is doctrine of equivalents?
Doctrine of equivalents is a noun.

Words near doctrine of equivalents in the dictionary

  1. doctrinarity
  2. doctrinary
  3. doctrination
  4. doctrinations
  5. doctrine
  6. doctrine of equivalents
  7. doctrine of foreign equivalents
  8. doctrine of necessity
  9. doctrine of philosophical necessity
  10. doctrine of signatures
  11. doctrineless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: doctrine of equivalents (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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