a. and sb. Law. [ad. med.L. fungibilis (‘res fungibiles’ Du Cange), f. fungī (with sense as in fungi vice, to take the place, fulfil the office of).
The adj. belongs to Civil Law and to the general theory of Jurisprudence; the sb. is in addition a current term of the law of Scotland.]
A. adj. (See quot. 1832.)
1818. H. T. Colebrooke, Oblig. & Contracts, I. 64. In the instance of money and other fungible articles.
1832. Austin, Jurispr. (1879), II. xlvi. 807. Where a thing which is the subject of an obligation … must be delivered in specie, the thing is not fungible: i. e. that very individual thing, and not another thing of the same or another class, in lieu of it, must be delivered. Where the subject of the obligation is a thing of a given class, the thing is said to be fungible: i. e. the delivery of any object which answers to the generic description will satisfy the terms of the obligation.
1886. The Saturday Review, LXII. 25 Dec., 853/1. A certain number of persons who do not, with certain modern curators of the Bodleian, regard books as ‘fungible,’ but exercise a choice as to the books they read, and who might even buy a good book of Alpine travel plainly brought to their attention, may be lost as readers and buyers.
B. sb. A fungible thing.
a. 1765. Erskine, Inst., III. i. § 18 (1773), I. 418. Grain and coin are fungibles, because one guinea, or one bushel or boll of sufficient merchantable wheat, precisely supplies the place of another.
1865. McLennan, Prim. Marriage, i., in Stud. Anc. Hist. (1887), 8. The Libripens with his scales, officiating at a will or act of adoption … illustrates the sources whence all ideas of formal dispositions were derived—the sale of fungibles.
1874. Act 37 & 38 Vict., c. 94 § 15. Casualties … paid in money or in fungibles at fixed periods or intervals.
1880. Muirhead, Gaius, Digest 489. If he … had been guilty of immorality, he was punished by being required to restore fungibles at once.
