How the courts find a testator's intended meaning in the words of a will, and what happens when a gift is ambiguous, mistaken or fails altogether.
A will only takes effect as the court reads it, and the rules of construction determine who actually inherits. This chapter starts with the principles governing the meaning of ordinary and technical words and the date at which gifted property is judged, then moves to the evidence the court may use — the armchair principle and the limited gateway for extrinsic evidence where the wording is ambiguous. It explains how rectification under s.20 differs from interpretation, the two qualifying errors and the time limit, before distinguishing conceptual from evidential uncertainty and classifying legacies as specific, general or demonstrative. It closes with the ways gifts fail — lapse, ademption, witnessing beneficiaries, divorce and the s.33 anti-lapse provision — and the class-closing rules that fix membership of a class gift.
