Definition
A term from Scots law meaning usury — the taking of interest on a loan of money in contravention of legal prohibitions. In the historical Scots legal system, charging any interest on money lent could constitute oker when such conduct was forbidden by law. The term is archaic and has no operative meaning in modern legal practice; it appears primarily in historical Scots legal texts and glossaries.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Interest on money; usury; increase.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): See Ocher. [Webster's 1913 does not carry a substantive entry for oker as a standalone word.]
The common and legal meanings here converge rather than diverge: the ordinary sense of the word (interest or usury) maps directly onto its legal sense. The legal specificity lies not in a different meaning but in the legal consequence — in Scots law, oker was not merely a description of interest-taking but a characterization of that conduct as unlawful. A researcher should not assume that every instance of the word in historical sources carries legal freight; context determines whether the writer means interest generally or specifically prohibited usury.
Common Confusion
Oker should not be confused with the common English word ocher (or ochre), the yellow-brown pigment. Webster's 1913 redirects "oker" to "ocher," reflecting an alternative spelling of the pigment name. These are entirely unrelated words. A researcher encountering "oker" in a Scots legal text is almost certainly reading a usury reference, not a color reference; the legal and chromatic spellings are homographs in some older sources.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research risk with oker is false negatives: because the term is confined to Scots law and to a specific historical period, modern legal databases will not index it as a live concept. Researchers working in pre-modern Scottish legal records, ecclesiastical court materials, or comparative histories of usury law will encounter it; researchers in English common law sources almost certainly will not.
The historical prohibition on usury in Scots law tracked canon law influences, so oker may appear in ecclesiastical records alongside civil legal proceedings. Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland is the authoritative source cited by all three historical dictionaries for this term, making it the first stop for anyone needing fuller context.
Because English common law developed its own parallel usury vocabulary — including the terms usury, interest, and foenerator — researchers comparing English and Scots sources on money-lending prohibitions should be alert to the terminological divergence. The substantive law was often similar; the vocabulary was not.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — both editions of Black's and Burrill's — give identical one-sentence definitions, each citing Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland as the authority. This unanimity reflects copying from a single source rather than independent verification; none of the dictionaries elaborates beyond Bell's formulation. No source provides historical depth on when the prohibition arose, how it was enforced, or when it fell into disuse. Burrill adds the abbreviation "Sc." explicitly marking the term as Scots law. The brevity of all three entries signals that even nineteenth-century American legal lexicographers treated oker as a peripheral foreign-law curiosity rather than a term with ongoing practical relevance.
Jurisdictional Note
Oker is exclusively a Scots law term. It has no recognized meaning in English common law, American law, or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers should treat any appearance of the term in non-Scottish sources as either a deliberate comparative reference or a transcription error.