alienableadj.

1604 R. Dallington View of Fraunce sig. N4 Yee must obserue, that the lands of the Domaine are not alienable, but in two cases.

1643 D. Digges Unlawfulnesse Subj. i. 4 Their nerves and sinewes are not alienable, as their money and goods.

1728 E. Chambers Cycl. at Alienation Crown-Lands are only alienable under a Faculty of perpetual Redemption.

1754 T. Rutherforth Inst. Nat. Law I. x. 148 All our rights are alienable, as far as it is not contrary to any law for us to part with them.

1832 I. Taylor Sat. Evening 465 Looking to things exterior and alienable, as his wealth.

1876 G. Bancroft Hist. U.S. (rev. ed.) I. x. 334 All lands and heritages were declared free and alienable.

1926 H. W. Codrington Short Hist. Ceylon iii. 48 These lands were heritable and alienable and seem to have descended in the male or female line.

1996 R. H. Bork Slouching towards Gomorrah i. iii. 57 The ‘unalienable Rights’ of the Declaration turned out, of course, frequently to be alienable.

1911 F. Boas & J. R. Swanton in F. Boas Handbk. Amer. Indian Lang. (U.S. Bureau Amer. Ethnol. Bull. No. 40) I. 890 In the possessive pronouns the ideas of inalienable and alienable possession are distinguished.

1968 J. Lyons Introd. Theoret. Linguistics vii. 301 Typical instances of alienable and inalienable relationships would be ‘John's book’ and ‘John's father’ respectively.

1978 Language 54 460 The distinction between alienable and inalienable possession has been known for a long time... The second example (the alienable interpretation) forces us to recognize an arm that is in the possession of Baba, but is not his own.

1991 D. Crystal Dict. Linguistics & Phonetics (ed. 3) 14 Distinctions of alienable possession are not morphologically marked in English, but semantically the contrast can be seen in the boy's book (alienable) and the boy's leg (inalienable).

2008 Oceanic Linguistics 47 323 The Papuan languages of eastern Indonesia and East Timor contrast alienable and inalienable possessive relationships.