notarius

Notarius, notarii, m., second declension, from nota, a shorthand mark. The original notarius is a stenographer, trained in the notae Tironianae that Cicero's freedman Tiro is credited with inventing, and hired to take dictation at speaking speed. That is a technical job, not a legal one.

Late antiquity promotes him. Under the later empire the notarii are a senior secretariat attached to the imperial consistory, and Ammianus writes about them as men with real power. Medieval Latin then fixes the modern sense: the officer who draws up, witnesses and authenticates documents, whose office survives across Europe today. The shorthand died out by the twelfth century; the job title outlived it by another eight hundred years and counting.