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There's an argument that "real" in "real estate" doesn't mean "tangible", but comes from "royal" or "real" in Spanish, meaning the King ultimately owns all the

• seszett 9y ago
  It would more likely come from French (in which "réal" meant "royal" in the past, see Montréal - Mount Royal) seeing how French influenced English legal terms and such.
• narag 9y ago
  It comes from Latin res-rei, meaning "thing" because it's about the property of material stuff, as opposed to inmaterial... you can own a right. In Spanish there's that "real" too (as in "derechos reales", "real estate taxes"), that makes it third meaning after "real" and "royal".
  • baursak 9y ago
    That's why I said there was an argument, instead of anything definitive. There's a link to a Wikipedia revision discussing this in length on this StackExchange page: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66379/whats-the-literal-meaning-of-real-estate https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66379/whats-the-... This explanation makes more sense to me intuitively, as there is a lot of material stuff that is not "real estate", in fact majority of stuff that is material is not real estate.
    • narag 9y ago
      This is one of the times I can say for sure that I know what I'm saying. A mix of improbable circumstances. The funny thing about the link you share is that the two comments that offer the real answer are the least voted. They explain why actions were called in rem (a demand related to possesions as opposed to in personam) and that real estate is refered to goods that you can't move, as opposed to furniture. Actually in Spanish real estate is "inmueble" while furniture is "mueble".
      • baursak 9y ago
        Thanks, this was useful.