queue

Latin cauda meant the tail of an animal, particularly the trailing appendage of a dog or ox. Roman writers used cauda in both literal and figurative senses: the end of a sentence, the trailing part of a procession, the elongated lower stroke of certain written letters. The word passed into Old French as coe or coue, then shifted to queue, retaining that root sense of a thing that hangs or trails behind. By the 14th century, French heraldists were using queue to describe the tail of a beast on a coat of arms.