Mail, documents, filing in French

Part way down this list sits l’accusé de lecture, the read receipt, and it is the entry an English reader most often mistranslates on sight. Accusé is the past participle of accuser, and « accused » is exactly what it looks like: a man in the dock. Here it means nothing of the kind. Beside the courtroom sense, French keeps an older and neutral one: accuser is to make something show, to put it on the record. So accuser réception d’une lettre is to acknowledge receipt of it, l’accusé de réception is the slip the post office hands back, and l’accusé de lecture is what your software returns when somebody opens your message. The same neutral sense runs through le train accuse deux heures de retard, where the train blames nobody, and through son visage accusait la fatigue, where a face shows what it shows. The rule is about what follows the verb: with a thing after it rather than a person, accuser accuses nobody — read it as « register », and the office vocabulary falls into place.