An obsolete term for advantage or precedence in medieval English.
From Old French 'devance,' related to 'devant' (before/in front). The word comes from Latin 'de-' + 'vant' (coming), with roots in the concept of being ahead of someone.
This word almost completely vanished from English by the 1500s, replaced by 'advantage,' but its French cousin 'devance' survives in legal French, showing how some words die while their relatives live on in specialized vocabularies.
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