Skip to content
OneKitly

attorney

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//əˈtɜːni//
  • United States//əˈtɜɹni//
  • //ʔɐˈtoɹ.ni//

A lawyer; one who advises or represents others in legal matters as a profession.

noun

  1. 1

    A lawyer; one who advises or represents others in legal matters as a profession.

    If those attempts are unsuccessful, the attorney requesting the interrogatories may file a motion for sanctions with the court. The sanctions range from attorney fees to prohibiting the nonanswering party from presenting or defending claims.

    “Conflicting out” attorneys is the way a husband will make sure his wife doesn't hire any of the most aggressive lawyers in town.

  2. 2

    An agent or representative authorized to act on someone else's behalf in accordance with that person's instructions.

    Near-synonyms: agent, proxy, representative

  3. 3

    datedOne such who practised in the courts of the common law.

  4. 4

    rareA solicitor.

  5. 5

    An honorific given to lawyers and notaries public, or those holders by profession who also do other jobs. Usually capitalized or abbreviated as Atty.

  6. 6

    An attorney tree (Clusia spp.)

  7. 7

    A prosecutor.

Etymology

From Middle English attourne, from Old French atorné, past participle of atorner, atourner, aturner (“to attorn”), in the sense of "one appointed or constituted".

verb

  1. 1

    rareTo work as a legal attorney.

  2. 2

    rareTo provide with a legal attorney.

Forms

plural
attorneys, attornies
past tense
attorneyed
past participle
attorneyed
present participle
attorneying
third person singular
attorneys
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).