Definition
A Latin adverb meaning "then" or "at that time." In legal usage, tunc appears almost exclusively as the second half of the phrase nunc pro tunc — meaning "now for then" — and has no independent legal force as a standalone term. When cited alone, it signals the temporal reference point in a nunc pro tunc order or entry: the past moment to which a court's present action is deemed to relate back.
Tunc is the correlative of nunc ("now"). The pairing is grammatically and legally inseparable: nunc names the moment of the court's present act; tunc names the earlier moment to which that act is retroactively assigned effect.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. Tunc is not part of modern English vocabulary.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The word passed directly from classical Latin into legal Latin without establishing independent English usage.
Editorial note: Because tunc carries no English-language meaning at all — common or otherwise — a researcher encountering it in any legal document should treat it immediately as a fragment of the nunc pro tunc construction and read the surrounding text accordingly.
Common Confusion
Tunc is sometimes cited in isolation in older case reporters and in marginal annotations, which can mislead a researcher into treating it as a self-contained term of art. It is not. A court order reading only "tunc" in an index or headnote is a truncated reference to nunc pro tunc relief. Similarly, tunc should not be confused with tum, the related Latin adverb from which it derives, which appears in classical Latin sources and Roman legal texts but not in common law legal usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Tunc matters in corpus research almost entirely as an indexing and search problem. In older printed reporters, law dictionaries, and equity records, nunc pro tunc was sometimes abbreviated, split across lines, or indexed under one word rather than both. A search returning tunc without nunc may indicate a truncated entry, a typographical error, or an archaic indexing convention — not a distinct legal doctrine.
Researchers working in early English and colonial American records should watch for variant spellings and Latin abbreviations. The phrase nunc p. tunc or n.p.t. appears in some manuscript court records, and tunc alone sometimes appears as a cross-reference marker pointing back to the nunc pro tunc entry.
Because tunc functions only relationally — it means nothing without the temporal "now" that nunc supplies — any legal analysis turning on a tunc reference is in substance an analysis of nunc pro tunc doctrine: the court's authority to correct the record, the permissible reach of relation-back, and the rights of intervening parties.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary defines tunc simply as "Then. The correlative of nunc, (now.)" with a citation to Dyer 18a, one of the early English case reporters from the sixteenth century. The entry is minimal by design: Burrill treats tunc as a building-block word requiring only enough definition to make nunc pro tunc intelligible, not as an independent term warranting extended treatment.
The Latin dictionary tradition is consistent with Burrill. Classical Latin sources confirm that tunc is an emphatic, point-specific adverb of time — referring to a definite moment rather than a general period — which aligns precisely with its function in nunc pro tunc, where the "then" in question is always a specific, identifiable past date. Post-Augustan Latin allows tunc to refer to periods rather than points, but this looser usage does not appear to have influenced legal Latin, where the term retained its precise, moment-anchored sense.
No surveyed historical dictionary treats tunc as having independent legal significance beyond its role in nunc pro tunc. This consensus is itself instructive: the term's meaning has been stable and uncontested across centuries.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: NUNC PRO TUNC