Your account, and moving it to another bank

Le motif du virement is the line on a transfer form that tells the recipient what the money is for, and an English reader will reach for the wrong word twice over. English took this single French noun on two separate occasions and gave the two arrivals different jobs. The first came in the fourteenth century and settled as « motive »: the reason somebody acts, the thing a court looks for behind a deed. The second was fetched from modern French in the nineteenth century, kept the French spelling, and became « motif »: a shape that comes back, on a wallpaper, in a fabric, in a piece of music. French never divided them. Le motif is the reason — le motif du licenciement, les motifs du jugement — and it is also the pattern on a curtain, un tissu à motifs. On a bank form it is neither of the two English words but a third thing the reason has grown into: the wording that lets the other side recognise the payment. What English calls that is « the payment reference », and nothing shorter will do.