1. In English common law, a personal chattel (movable property) that was forfeited to the Crown when it was the direct cause of a person's death, based on the belief that the object was cursed or unlucky.
Usage: archaic; historical; legal term; plural form of deodand

Examples

• Under medieval English law, deodands were seized by the Crown as a form of punishment for the object that caused death.
• If a horse killed a person, that horse would be declared a deodand and forfeited to the king.
• The practice of collecting deodands reflected a belief that inanimate objects could bear moral responsibility.
• Deodands were eventually abolished in England in the 19th century as legal thinking evolved.
• Historians study deodands as examples of how early legal systems attributed agency to objects.