Definition
To put a document on file; to place a pleading, writ, or other paper into the official record of a court proceeding. An archaic term from old English practice, now entirely supplanted by the verb "to file." Encountered primarily in pre-nineteenth-century legal texts and reports.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in standard modern use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To polish." [Obs.]
The Webster's sense — to smooth or polish — shares no functional relationship with the legal meaning. The legal term derives from law Latin afilare (to put on a thread or string, referencing the physical act of threading documents onto a string or wire for court storage), not from any English sense of polishing. A researcher encountering "affile" in an old manuscript should not be misled by any residual common-language association.
Common Confusion
AFFILE vs. FILE: These are functionally identical in meaning. "Affile" is simply the older, Latinized form. Historical sources sometimes treat them as distinct stages of evolution, but no substantive legal difference separates them. Researchers should treat any instance of "affile" in old reports as equivalent to the modern procedural act of filing.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is recognition: a researcher working in early English reports, Year Books, or pre-nineteenth-century American colonial records may encounter "affile" or "affiled" and need to map it onto the modern concept of filing. The term carries no procedural nuance that "file" does not. It does not signal a distinct legal act, a different standard, or a separate procedural requirement.
The citation to 2 Maule & Selwyn 202 — reproduced consistently across Black's and Burrill's — is the standard authority for the term's meaning in the historical dictionaries, and it is the only specific authority they offer. Researchers who need to trace the term's judicial use should begin there.
One navigational trap: Burrill's entry interrupts its definition of "affile" with a digression into the etymology of "affidavit" and then begins an entry for "affiliation" — an artifact of the dictionary's original typesetting. Researchers consulting Burrill's in manuscript or early printed form should be alert to this textual bleed-through and not conflate the three entries.
No modern procedural codes use "affile." The term has no living jurisdictional variation worth tracking. Its appearance in any post-nineteenth-century document would be an affectation or a transcription of older language.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree entirely on meaning, origin, and current status. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's each define the term as the old practice equivalent of "to file," each cite 2 Maule & Selwyn 202 as authority, and each note the contraction to modern "file." There is no divergence among the sources on any point.
Burrill's adds the law Latin form afilare, which is useful for researchers tracing the term through ecclesiastical or civil-law influenced records, where Latinate forms persisted longer than in common-law courts.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on the physical origin of the filing metaphor — the practice of threading documents on a string or wire — which provides useful context for understanding why both "affile" and "file" carry the same meaning. That physical practice explains the linguistic lineage more clearly than the dictionaries themselves do.
Jurisdictional Note
No meaningful jurisdictional variation exists. The term was an English common-law archaism already obsolete by the time American courts were generating their own procedural vocabulary. It appears, if at all, only in early colonial or reception-era American records that were themselves drawing on English practice.