grandfathering

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The practice of exempting people or things already established from new laws or regulations.

   The zoning board approved grandfathering for businesses that opened before the ordinance took effect.

   Without grandfathering, every factory would have had to install the new filters immediately.

   Similarexemption

   Note

   A policy word that has become contested. Steven Pinker could write in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) of "the grandfathering of boundaries" as a pacifying development. Yet in 2020 an appeals court in Massachusetts said it would no longer use the term because "it has racist origins." In legal or official writing, a plain phrase about exempting existing cases may be the safer choice. Elsewhere it is usually uncountable and followed by of.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of grandfather.

   The agency is grandfathering permits issued before the policy change.

   Lawmakers considered grandfathering existing plants rather than forcing immediate upgrades.

   Note

   The verb behind the regulatory jargon is transitive: one grandfathers something, so the -ing form takes a direct object, as in grandfathering existing plants. That object is what separates it from the exemption noun, which needs of instead (the grandfathering of boundaries). The rule-keeping use is marked US. The same form can also simply mean being, or acting as, a grandfather to someone.

Showing meanings only. Show all 2