Plural of entailment; legal restrictions or conditions that limit how property, especially land and estates, can be inherited, sold, or transferred.
From 'entail' + '-ment' (result of action) + '-s' (plural). Entailment is the legal instrument that restricts property inheritance, derived from Old French 'entailler' (to limit).
American founders like Thomas Jefferson actually hated entailments and worked to make them illegal—they saw them as undemocratic relics that let dead ancestors control living people's property for centuries, which is why most U.S. states abolished them by the 1820s.
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