Definition
An archaic spelling variant of ATTORNEY. The term appears in early legal texts and is not a distinct legal concept. See ATTORNEY for the substantive definition.
Common Confusion
ATTURNEY should not be mistaken for a legally distinct term. It is an orthographic variant only. Researchers who encounter it in a source should not conclude they have found a specialized role or office different from an attorney.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-modern legal manuscripts, early printed treatises, or transcribed records may encounter this spelling and should recognize it as identical in meaning to the modern ATTORNEY. Spelling was not standardized in English legal writing until well into the early modern period, and scribal and typographical variation was common in both court records and legal reference works. Burrill notes the form was used by John Cowell, whose Interpreter (1607) is an early legal dictionary source — meaning this spelling circulated in the foundational layer of English legal lexicography. If a document search in a historical corpus returns ATTURNEY but not ATTORNEY, the researcher should treat both as the same term and broaden the search accordingly. Variant spellings of this kind are one of the most common sources of missed hits in full-text searches of digitized historical legal materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies ATTURNEY simply as "an old form of attorney, used by Cowell," providing no independent definition. This is the correct treatment: the entry exists solely as a finding aid to redirect readers, not to define a separate concept. Historical dictionaries of this period routinely flagged orthographic variants as headwords precisely because readers encountering an unfamiliar spelling in a source document needed confirmation that the term was known, if not current. The entry's brevity is itself informative — it signals that by Burrill's time (mid-nineteenth century), the variant had passed entirely out of professional use and warranted only a cross-reference.