Scott in Madison, Wisconsin, is curious about the word invoice. It’s related to the English word envoy, and comes from French, envois, literally “things sent.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Invoice and Envoy”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Scott. I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin.
Hey, Scott, welcome to the show. How can we help you?
I am a small business owner. In fact, one person, it’s me. And so I’m in charge of the billing.
And the question I have concerns the word invoice. So on the top of my forms, it says invoice form.
And I thought to myself, as I was listening to your show, as a matter of fact, what the heck does that mean? And I tried to break it down into syllables in voice. That didn’t do anything for me, quite honestly. I was lying. It didn’t help. But my question to you is, can you give me a brief derivation of the word invoice? Brief. You’re asking the wrong people. Well, this is your time to horrid date. So when you looked at invoice, you said, wait, voice is in there. This has nothing to do with voice, V-O-I-C-E.
Correct.
Yeah, yeah.
But you might be not surprised to hear that it has something to do with envoy, somebody that you send to, say, do something diplomatic.
Aha.
You’re feeling that?
Yeah, because they both go back to French, the French words, and ultimately, of course, Latin, having to do with to put something, to send something on its way, to send, basically.
And so there’s a French word, envoi, plural with an S on the end. It means something that has been sent or things that have been sent. And so it’s an English spelling corruption of the French plural word meaning things sent. And so an invoice is something that you send to someone else. And in this case, it became specialized in English to mean something that you send saying, pay me now.
All right.
That’s it, really.
That’s your brief explanation that you wanted.
That is wonderful.
I really want to thank you guys for all you do for us. And because of your wonderful services, feel free to send an invoice.
That would be our pleasure.
What’s that address?
Thanks a lot again, guys.
All right.
Take care of yourself.
Bye-bye.
Have a great day.
Bye-bye.
Well, you’ve been sitting at your desk, and you come across a word, and you’re just starting to puzzle over it like Scott did, you can always give us a call and talk about it.
