Definition
An archaic term for an interpreter — a person who translates or mediates between speakers of different languages, particularly in a legal or official proceeding. The word appears almost exclusively in the writings of Sir Edward Coke and has no independent legal meaning beyond the synonym it supplies. It survives in the legal vocabulary only as a historical curiosity, encountered when reading early common law texts.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A synonym for "interpreter."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "An interpreter. [Obs.] Coke."
Both the common and legal meanings are identical — LATIMER simply means interpreter. The word is flagged here not because a gap exists between common and legal usage, but because both sources mark it as obsolete and trace it to Coke specifically. Researchers encountering the term in a legal context need to know it carries no specialized legal meaning beyond the ordinary one.
Common Confusion
LATIMER is sometimes encountered as a proper surname — most notably that of the Protestant martyr Hugh Latimer — and researchers scanning early legal texts may initially mistake it for a personal name rather than a common noun. Context usually resolves the ambiguity: Coke uses it as a functional description, not a reference to a person.
Why It Matters in Research
This term has almost no operational significance in modern legal research. Its value is strictly historical: it appears in Coke's Institutes (2 Inst. 515) and will be encountered by researchers working through that text or through commentary on it. Any secondary source that quotes or paraphrases Coke on the role of interpreters in medieval or early modern legal proceedings may use LATIMER as shorthand.
Researchers should be aware of two navigational points:
First, the word is a dead end as a research term. Searching for LATIMER in legal databases will surface the surname far more often than the noun, and the noun itself adds nothing that searching "interpreter" would not supply more efficiently.
Second, the underlying historical substance — the role of interpreters in English legal proceedings — is the genuinely researchable topic. Early common law courts operated in Latin and later in Law French, and the need for linguistic intermediaries shaped procedural rules in ways that may be relevant to historians of the court system. LATIMER is a marker pointing toward that literature, not a discrete legal doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement, differing only in the degree of etymological detail they supply. All four trace the word to Coke's Institutes (2 Inst. 515) and describe it as a likely corruption of the French latinier or latiner.
Bouvier adds the most substantive note: he suggests the word derives from the Latin-speaker's role as interpreter during the period of Roman linguistic dominance, and cites Camden's agreement that it denoted either a Frenchman or an interpreter, with the word appearing in an old inquisition. This is a useful reminder that the term has a documented, if narrow, archival life outside Coke's text alone.
Black's (both editions) and Burrill track together almost verbatim, relying on Cowell and Blount as secondary authorities — both standard glossaries of legal antiquities. None of the dictionaries suggest the word ever carried a technical legal meaning distinct from its common meaning; all treat it as a synonym in costume.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural context in which interpreters functioned in medieval English courts, the rules governing their competency or oath, or any jurisdictional variation in the term's use. Researchers seeking that material will need to look beyond the dictionary shelf.