A Moot Point

[shiznit]

What does the saying "A Moot Point" mean

[jno]

a debatable point, one to which there's no obvious or clear-cut answer. Moot is related to the word meet - once upon a time, a council or other body would meet to debate such points.

[acw]

Mooting is also an activity that many law students are involved in.  It is where we/they learn to debate in a legal style and present their ideas in the same way a barrister would.  There are many mooting competitions around the world. 

 

Not entirely relevant, but it is true!

[flaming]

I forget dates but I think it is Anglo-Saxon word? Moot Houses were where the elders/councils  of a village or area would have met for their moots down the ages.  I have only seen one,  The Moot House, Aldeburgh, East Anglia. Can't remember the date of that one, used as a social centre/local hall now, I believe.  There probably are quite a few about.

[woofgang]

The moot was a saxon way of deciding village business. The members would meet and discuss the issues until they reached agreement. Thus a moot point is one that takes a lot of discussion and on which there are many valid views

[Clanad]

Perhaps my point is more of an Americanism, however this phrase generally has a different meaning here.  It also involves an apparent modern shift of meaning; It is a misunderstanding of another sense of moot for a discussion forum in which hypothetical cases are argued by law students for practice. Since there is no practical outcome of these sessions, and the cases are invented anyway, people seem to have assumed that a moot point means one of no importance. So we�ve seen a curious shift in which the sense of �open to debate� has become �not worth debating�. (With help from Wikipedia)

[Peter Pedant]

A word with two opposite meanings is an antonym. Clanad is describing how this can occur.