Definition
EXAƦITR (also rendered EXA'IT'R) is a contracted scribal abbreviation for the Latin *examinatur*, meaning "it is examined" or "let it be examined." The term appears in historical legal records, particularly in English court documents, as a clerk's notation indicating that a document, pleading, or record has been reviewed and approved by a court officer or examiner. It functions as a formal attestation mark rather than a substantive legal term.
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Common Confusion
EXAƦITR (*examinatur*, "it is examined") should not be confused with *examinatus* ("having been examined"), which appears in depositions and witness records to denote that a witness has been sworn and questioned. The former is a clerk's attestation of a document; the latter describes a completed witness examination. In poorly transcribed or digitized historical records, the two may be conflated, particularly where the terminal abbreviation marks are ambiguous.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this abbreviation in manuscript court records, enrolled instruments, or early printed law reports should treat it as a procedural attestation notation, not a term of legal substance. Its significance is paleographic and documentary: the presence of *examinatur* or its contraction signals that a clerk or examiner of the court has formally reviewed the document for accuracy or compliance with court process.
The contraction takes several forms in historical manuscripts — EXA'IT'R, Exaʀr, and variants thereof — because early legal copyists abbreviated frequently used Latin terms to save space on costly parchment. Researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century English common law records, particularly plea rolls, chancery documents, and enrolled writs, will encounter this notation as part of the routine documentary apparatus of the English courts. It should not be confused with substantive judicial language or with the notation *examinatus* (examined, as applied to a witness).
The reference in Burrill to *1 Inst. Cl. 10* points to *The Clerk's Instructor* or a comparable early guide to English court practice, the class of source that trained clerks in the proper use of such abbreviations. Researchers should be aware that early practical clerk's manuals are a primary source for decoding this layer of abbreviated Latin in court records, and that the abbreviation may appear inconsistently across different courts and periods.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole major historical legal dictionary to give this term a discrete entry, and its treatment is appropriately minimal: it identifies the term as a contraction of *examinatur* and cites a clerk's practice manual. No substantive legal definition is offered beyond the contraction itself, which accurately reflects the term's purely procedural and notational character.
Neither Bouvier's Law Dictionary nor Black's Law Dictionary carries a dedicated entry for this abbreviation, which is consistent with its nature as a scribal contraction rather than a legal concept. The absence from those sources is not a gap — it reflects the term's proper place in the vocabulary of court record-keeping rather than in the vocabulary of legal doctrine.
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