Definition
One who indorses a negotiable instrument — typically a promissory note, bill of exchange, or check — by signing the back of it, thereby transferring the instrument to another party and, in most cases, undertaking secondary liability for its payment if the primary obligor defaults. The indorsor's signature may accomplish one or more of three things: transfer of title to the instrument, guarantee of payment, and qualification of the conditions under which the indorsor may be held liable.
INDORSOR is the older and, as Burrill notes, strictly more correct spelling of what modern practice universally renders as INDORSER. The two are the same office and the same legal actor; the difference is purely orthographic.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Archaic form of endorser — one who endorses something, whether a document, a product, or a candidate.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; treated as a variant of endorser, meaning one who writes upon the back of a paper, particularly a bill or note.
The gap worth noting: In ordinary modern language, "endorser" most commonly evokes celebrity product endorsement or political support. In the law of commercial paper, the indorsor is a technical party with defined rights and liabilities — specifically, the conditional obligation to pay if the instrument is dishonored and proper notice given. The everyday sense carries none of that liability structure.
Common Confusion
INDORSOR / INDORSER: These are the same term in different orthographic dress. Researchers should not treat them as distinct parties or distinct legal concepts. Historical sources — particularly older English authorities and early American treatises — favor INDORSOR. Modern statutes, the UCC, and contemporary case law use INDORSER exclusively. Searching only one spelling in historical databases will produce incomplete results.
INDORSOR / MAKER: The maker signs the face of a note and is the primary obligor. The indorsor signs the back and is a secondary obligor. Confusion between these roles distorts the liability analysis.
INDORSOR / ACCOMMODATION INDORSOR: An accommodation indorsor signs to lend credit to another party without receiving value for the instrument itself. This is a recognized subtype with distinct legal treatment and should not be conflated with an indorsor in the ordinary course of a transaction.
Why It Matters in Research
The spelling INDORSOR is a reliable marker of age in legal sources. When it appears in a case, treatise, or form, the document almost certainly predates the twentieth century and likely predates widespread American codification of negotiable instruments law. Researchers working in early American commercial law, colonial mercantile practice, or English common law sources should treat INDORSOR as the expected form and not as an error or variant to be filtered out.
Because Burrill cites 11 Mod. 369 as authority for INDORSOR being the stricter form, that citation anchors the spelling preference in early eighteenth-century English common law reporting. Researchers tracing the doctrinal roots of indorser liability into English precedent may find INDORSOR the more productive search term in older reporters.
The shift from INDORSOR to INDORSER tracks the broader Americanization and simplification of commercial law vocabulary across the nineteenth century. When the Negotiable Instruments Law was adopted state by state beginning in the 1890s, and later when Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code standardized terminology in the mid-twentieth century, INDORSER became the fixed statutory form. Any source using INDORSOR post-1900 is either quoting older authority, reproducing archaic forms, or working in a jurisdiction that was slow to adopt uniform commercial law.
In corpus searches, run both spellings. Historical digitization of legal texts frequently preserves original orthography, and automated normalization is unreliable for variant legal spellings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is terse but precise: INDORSOR is characterized as "an old form of indorser, and strictly the true form of the word," citing 11 Mod. 369. This entry does useful work — it confirms that even by the time of Burrill's compilation, the word was already being displaced by INDORSER, yet it asserts that the older form had the stronger etymological claim. The citation to Modern Reports grounds this not in Burrill's own opinion but in judicial usage.
What historical dictionaries do not do: they provide no account of the indorsor's actual legal duties, the conditions on liability, or the procedural requirements (demand, dishonor, notice) that must be met before an indorsor can be held. Researchers should treat INDORSOR in historical dictionaries as a spelling and identification entry only, not a substantive treatment of secondary liability on negotiable instruments.
Jurisdictional Note
Modern American law governs indorser liability under UCC Article 3, which has been adopted in all U.S. jurisdictions in substantially uniform form. Variation exists at the margins — particularly in how states have treated warranty liability and the effect of anomalous indorsements — but the core liability framework is nationally consistent. Historical variation, however, was significant: pre-NIL American states applied different common law rules on notice and presentment, and English authority did not always translate cleanly.