Including, but not limited to introduces a list of examples and says outright that the list is not complete, so unnamed things of the same kind are covered as well. It belongs to American legal drafting of the last century or so, and a New York construction contract quoted in court in 1919 already used the exact wording.
What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘Including, but not limited to’?
‘Including, but not limited to’ is easiest to explain in an example. Like this…
There might be a sign on a park’s gate with a warning like this:
“In this park certain activities are not permitted, including, but not limited to, skateboarding, cycling and ball games.”
The park authorities list some of the things that they don’t allow but, by using “not limited to” they are making it clear that other activities, like car racing or bear-baiting, might be disallowed too.
It wouldn’t be practical, or necessary, to list everything you can’t do in the park, so the authorities pick some important ones and then add the ‘and any other unlisted thing we don’t like’ in the ‘not limited to’ rider.
People are often unsure about the punctuation of ‘including, but not limited to’.
The expression is clearer if sub-phrase ‘but not limited to’ is bracketed off in some way. Any of these could be used for that:
A. Including, but not limited to, skateboarding, cycling and ball games.
B. Including - but not limited to - skateboarding, cycling and ball games.
C. Including (but not limited to) skateboarding, cycling and ball games.
All of the above convey the meaning and are grammatically correct. B and C are rather clunky though and commas, as in A are perfectly adequate.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Including, but not limited to’?
The expression “including, but not limited to” arose and is usually used in legal or other official contexts.
The phrase belongs to American legal drafting of the last century or so, and it is at least a century old. A construction contract between Post & McCord, Inc. and the New York Municipal Railway Corporation, set out in the Appellate Division’s decision of 4 April 1919, made the contractor “solely responsible for any and all injury or damage to persons or property, including but not limited to passengers, employees and property of existing elevated and surface railroads”. A few lines earlier the same contract had put a plain “including” in front of the identical list. The drafter had both forms to hand and used the longer one only in the clause that assigned the liability.
It was still a rarity then. A search of CourtListener’s full text of American court opinions, run in September 2026, turns up a single decision filed before 1920 that contains the exact wording, and that decision is the Post & McCord appeal itself. Run the same search against opinions filed before 1970 and it returns 1,844 of them. The phrase spread through American contracts and statutes in the middle of the twentieth century.
It isn’t really necessary, as a simple ‘including’ has the same legal force. The word ‘including’ doesn’t suggest exclusivity, so the ‘not limited to’ is superfluous.
We might say “the letters of the alphabet include a, b and c”. No one could argue that that suggests that a, b and c are the only letters of the alphabet.
However, lawyers like to cover their backs when writing contracts.
In essence the phrase is used to mean “including ‘these important things’, but also including ‘all the other things I can’t think of right now’.
The drafter’s defence was put by the legal-usage writer Bryan A. Garner in LawProse Lesson #226 on 2 September 2015. Garner agrees that ‘including’ carries the sense on its own, but he writes that “legal drafting isn’t served well by implications, as opposed to explicit denotations”, and that “courts have been known to accept these arguments, as by holding that including can introduce an exhaustive list”. His own remedy is a definition used once rather than the boilerplate repeated: “The best simple solution is to define including as meaning ‘including but not limited to’ in every legal instrument in which the word is used”.
The misreading Garner has in mind carries a name of its own. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School sets out the rule of ejusdem generis as the principle that “where general words or phrases follow a number of specific words or phrases, the general words are specifically construed as limited and apply only to persons or things of the same kind or class as those expressly mentioned”. A list of examples can therefore mark out the edge of a clause instead of merely illustrating it, and ‘but not limited to’ is the drafter trying to shut that reading down before a court can reach for it.
Garner also puts the phrase in wider company. Drafters who use it, he writes, are “typically addicted to other, similar pleonasms”: the doubled and tripled formulas that fill legal English, among them aid and abet and without let or hindrance.