receipt
receipt
Old French
“The silent p in receipt was inserted by scribes who never heard it spoken.”
Latin recipere, meaning to take back or receive, gave the Roman world both medical prescriptions and commercial acknowledgments in a single word. The past participle recepta became a noun: things received, sums collected, instructions for making a remedy. Roman pharmacists and Roman tax collectors reached for the same word.
Old French shaped recepta into receite around the 12th century. In medieval Paris, a receite was a doctor's formula, a cook's instruction, or a payment note, all three simultaneously. The word moved to England in the 14th century as receit, carrying its triple life intact.
In the 1400s, humanist scribes began restoring silent Latin letters to English words to show their learning. Receit became receipt on the page, though no one pronounced the p then or now. The same fashion gave debt the b from Latin debitum and salmon the l from Latin salmo.
The word split in two after the 17th century. Receipt kept the commercial meaning, a written acknowledgment of payment. Recipe broke off to handle cooking and medicine, taking the Latin imperative form. Two daughters of the same Latin mother, now living separate lives.
Related Words
Today
A receipt is a promise written down that the exchange happened, proof against later doubt, later denial, later dispute. The IRS and the medieval apothecary both reached for the same need: a record that cannot be argued away.
The silent p remains today, doing no phonetic work, only etymological. It is Latin fossilized in English, the signature of scribes who wanted you to know where they had been.
Explore more words