At this time of year we’re all turning to that annoying and sometimes stressful task of doing our taxes, and etymologically that’s appropriate. The verb tax comes from Old French taxer “to impose a tax”, from Latin taxare meaning “to evaluate, estimate, assess, handle” and also “to censure, charge” (and is probably a frequentative form of tangere “to touch”). This verb also led to the Medieval Latin noun taxa, which not only gave us the English noun tax through Old French taxe and Anglo-Norman French tax, but also through metathesis became Vulgar Latin *tasca “a duty, assessment” and Old North French tasque “duty, tax”, entering English in the 14th century with the sense “a quantity of labour imposed as a duty”, gaining its modern sense of “any piece of work that has to be done” by the 1590s.
The #ConnectedAtBirth #etymology of the week is TAX/TASK #wotd #task #tax #taxes #taxseason