APPUNCTUARE

Definition

A Latin term from old English law meaning to appoint. Used in formal legal instruments and records to denote the act of nominating or designating a person to a position or office. Appears in conjunction with related Latin terms of appointment, particularly in the phrase nominandi et appunctuandi — of nominating and appointing — where the two verbs together describe the full scope of a grantor's or appointing authority's power.

Why It Matters in Research

This term is purely a researcher's term. It will not appear in modern legal writing and has no operational significance in contemporary practice. Its relevance is limited to reading and interpreting old English legal instruments, court records, and grants — particularly those from the medieval and early modern periods when Law Latin was the standard language of formal legal documentation. The primary trap for corpus researchers is mistaking appunctuare for a term of art with substantive legal content distinct from simple appointment. It is not. The word carries no special procedural freight beyond its plain meaning: to appoint. When encountered in a historical document, it signals an appointment clause, and the surrounding text — who is being appointed, to what office or role, by whose authority — is where the substantive legal content lies. Researchers working in records involving ecclesiastical appointments, feudal office-holding, or royal grants will encounter this term most frequently. It often appears alongside nominare (to nominate), and the pairing nominandi et appunctuandi suggests that historical drafters sometimes distinguished nomination (the identification of a candidate) from appointment (the formal conferral of the position), even when the same party held both powers. Because the term appears in Law Latin sources, researchers should be alert to variant spellings and abbreviations common in manuscript records. The root punctuare (to point, to fix, to mark) connects appunctuare to a broader family of Latin legal terms involving designation and specification. Recognizing that root can aid in reading damaged or ambiguous text.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical source covering this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill's treatment is brief: he defines appunctuare as meaning to appoint in old English law and cites the phrase nominandi et appunctuandi from Bunbury's Reports (Bunb. 215) as an illustrative usage. The entry provides the essential navigational information — what the word means and a citation to its use — without extended analysis, which is appropriate given the term's limited substantive complexity. Burrill's entry transitions immediately into appurtenances, which reflects the organizational convention of Latin law dictionaries in the nineteenth century rather than any conceptual connection between the two terms. Researchers should not read significance into that proximity. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — including Black's or Bouvier's — appear to carry a dedicated entry for appunctuare, which suggests the term was already receding from active legal use by the time those works were compiled. This makes Burrill's citation to Bunbury's Reports the most useful documentary anchor for researchers seeking to trace the term in primary sources.

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