Letters patent (no singular form exists) are a type of legal instrument in the form of a published written order issued by a monarch or president, generally granting an office, right, monopoly, title, or status to a person or corporation. They are so named from the Latin verb pateo, to lie open, exposed, accessible. They are called thus from their Latin name litterae patentes long used by mediaeval and later scribes when such documents were written in Latin, expressed in the plural, in the ancient sense of a collection of letters of the alphabet arranged to be read rather than in the modern sense of the word as an "epistle" or item of correspondence; thus no singular form exists.
Letters patent can be used for the creation of corporations or government offices, or for the granting of city status or a coats of arms. A particular form of letters patent has evolved into the modern patent granting exclusive rights in an invention. Clearly in this case it is essential that the written grant should be in the form of a public document so other inventors can consult it to avoid infringement.
The opposite of letters patent are letters close (Latin: litterae clausae), which are personal in nature and sealed so that only the recipient can read their contents.
Read more about Letters Patent: Usage, Form of Royal Proclamations Post 1992, Proforma British Letters Patent
Famous quotes containing the words letters and/or patent:
“American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The cigar-box which the European calls a “lift” needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like the man’s patent purge—it works”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)