ABSTRACT
Words must be read in their context. In finding the right meaning to give to an Act of Parliament the reader must give close attention to the meaning of each word that is used. This will often involve turning to the judicial dictionaries or to the standard dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary to find the meanings to be given to individual words in the section. This attention to individual words, necessary as it is, can cause the reader to lose sight of the fact that those words are only part of the whole. What is really sought is not the meaning of individual words but the meaning of the Act as a whole. It would be easy to assign a correct meaning to each word individually and yet have a meaning for the section as a whole that is not the true meaning of that section. The pianist who has to play a chord does not get the proper result by playing each of the notes in that chord separately – they must be played together. So, too, the reader of an Act of Parliament must consider all the words of the section together.
