lawyer

The word lawyer appears in English around 1377, in William Langland's Piers Plowman, one of the earliest sustained poems in the vernacular. It is formed from law plus the agent suffix -er, on the model of sawyer from saw or baker from bake. But law itself is not a Latin or French inheritance: it comes from Old English lagu, borrowed directly from Old Norse log, the plural of lag, meaning 'that which is laid down,' brought to England by Viking settlers of the Danelaw in the 9th century.

Old Norse log was a vivid word. The thing men set down in deliberate layers: that is what law is. Norse legal culture was communal and procedural; the Althing of Iceland, established around 930 CE, was a gathering where laws were recited aloud each year by a Law Speaker (logsogumadhr) to ensure collective memory. By the 11th century, lagu had thoroughly displaced the Anglo-Saxon words for legal order: ae and dom, as in 'doom,' meaning judgment.

The suffix -er that makes a lawyer is itself remarkable. Old English had -ere for agent nouns: bocere for a scribe, fiscere for a fisherman. The Middle English -er that Langland uses on 'lawyere' is the same living suffix that forms agent nouns today. The profession the word named was taking shape in the 13th and 14th centuries, as the English Inns of Court — Gray's Inn, Lincoln's Inn, the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple — began formally training men to argue and advise in the royal courts.

The word crossed the Atlantic early. John Winthrop, who became the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a trained lawyer. 'Lawyer' retained its plain English character while legal systems in Continental Europe kept Roman-derived terms: avocat in French, avvocato in Italian, abogado in Spanish. In American culture, the lawyer became a figure of democratic mythology and democratic anxiety in equal measure, from Abraham Lincoln riding the Illinois circuit to John Grisham's overworked associates.