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.

English borrowed queue in the 16th century, initially in heraldry and then in the sense of a hanging braid of hair worn at the back of the neck. Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary recorded it as the tail of a peruke, a formal pigtail worn by soldiers and gentlemen. The military pigtail was called a queue because it resembled an animal's tail dangling behind the head. Soldiers spent considerable time maintaining these braided queues, which were often stiffened with grease and powder.

The sense of a line of people waiting arrived in English writing in the early 19th century, first in descriptions of French customs observed by British travelers. The Oxford English Dictionary records this usage from 1837, in Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, where Parisians formed queues outside bread shops during the hunger of 1789. The French had long used the phrase faire la queue, to make the tail, for joining a line. English adopted the noun directly, keeping the French spelling along with its silent letters.

The word's spelling still puzzles learners: four of its five letters are silent. Queue is the only common English word where removing the last four letters leaves the pronunciation unchanged. This apparent absurdity is simply the frozen form of Old French script, carried forward intact while the spoken form simplified over centuries. The tail of the word, like the tail it names, has always seemed to go on past the point of obvious necessity.