2 Replies to “Remit”

  1. 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. 😉

  2. 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