<<Thanks for all your thoughts on this. I should have mentioned that the time frame is c. 1620 and the incumbent used a mixture of Latin and English, and as far as I can tell (who has no Latin at all) not very well! We are fairly certain that the meaning will be now or declared child and at first thought it must mean declared as in a declaration of paternity made by the mother of an illegitimate child as other entries use the term base for illegitimate children. However.... (why is there always an 'however'?) I then found these entries: 22nd Oct - A child nunc: et alter ex gemell: Jacobi Scholefield 25th Oct - Josephe s. Of James Scholefield alter ex gemellis Joseph was baptised on the 22nd, possibly at the same time his twin was buried. So it would appear that James Scholefield was the father of twins, one of whom died before it was baptised. I wonder if this particular incumbent used the term nunc child for those children who died before baptism, that is 'declared' but not yet named before God? In other words these children were all non-viable for some reason, perhaps late miscarriages or still births rather than illegitimate? The reason I would like to know is that I am looking at a mortality crisis and the term abortive is given for many burials indicating possibly the effects of a famine and I need to be able to assign these nunc entries to a particular category of burial in order to come up with a set of stats to manipulate.>> Dear Barbara, Polly is surely right that the colon (at this time often used to indicate an abbreviation of a word) means it cannot be 'nunc', meaning 'now'. The most likely extension of 'nunc:' does seem to be 'nuncupative'. In the context of wills, this means 'oral, spoken', as opposed to written, but that is not its primary meaning, which is more to do with naming. In classical Latin 'nuncupo' meant 'to call, name', and in the medieval and early modern Latin used in England 'nuncupativus' meant 'named' (I've appended the entry for 'nuncupative' in Latham's Revised Medieval Latin Word-list - a more useful source for medieval and early modern English records than classical Latin dictionaries - at the end of this post). Consequently it seems unlikely that this clerk meant it to signify 'not yet named' (unless he mistakenly thought 'cupo' meant 'to name', and 'nuncupo' the opposite!). On the other hand it's a bit difficult to see why the clerk should record a child as 'nuncupative' if by that he meant 'named' - if it had been named, why not record it by that name? I have to confess to being baffled by it. My best guess is that perhaps the clerk used the word when he knew the child had been named but did not know the name, or could not recall it (in times of plague or famine or other upheaval the register might not have been written until some time afterwards). The two examples you quote are interesting. If they are both burials then, as you say, they seem to record the successive burial of twins, only the second of whom is recorded by name - but why the word 'et' in the first entry? It seems to suggest both twins were buried on the 22nd ("a child, of unknown name, and the other of twins"). But perhaps 'alter' here means not 'the other' but just 'one of', making the sense "a child, of unknown name, and one of twins". Your study sounds very interesting. Good luck with it. Matt Tompkins nuncupat/ive, literally, in virtue of the meaning of the word c1204; nominally, merely as a name c730. 12c., a 1452; -ivus, named, 793; nominal c1250, 14c; testamentum -ivum 1351, a 1564, t, -ive factum 1355, oral testament; -orius, naming, calling by name c793. This could be referenced in a footnote as: R.E. Latham, Medieval Latin Word-list from British and Irish Sources (Oxford, 1965), sub 'nuncupat'.