Remit
To send back
This word has pretty broad areas of usage, which intrigued me into looking it up. Remit comes from the Latin *mitto* which means to throw, send, eject, or bleed. The re- simply indicates being sent again.
There she goes, my beautiful world
Hi Steve! Hope you’re well.
Hi Steve! Hope you’re well. I just thought you might be interested to know that like many words remit is sometimes widely and falsely considered to be a direct loan from the Latin, but more likely comes to us from the French remettre — “to put or send back”, which is conjugated as remit in most common uses.
Now surely there’s a relationship between remettre and mitto, but since the French word is so close in both use and orthography, it’s pretty clear that that’s the route it took into the language.
Me, I’m just a little bit obsessed with etymology these days since it works out that for me one of the best ways to memorize words in a foreign language is to learn their histories. So, if this strikes you as pedantic just ignore me. 😉
According to my OED, remit
According to my OED, remit is “ad. L. remittere, f. re + mittere to send” which I translate as “adaptation of the Latin ‘remittere’ from ‘re’ + ‘mittere’ meaning ‘to send.’ ” So I vote for a direct, albeit parallel, descent from Latin.
Dad