Forestry

L’accroissement annuel is the volume a stand adds in a year, and the verb sitting inside it has done more work in English than any reader would guess. Croître is to grow, from Latin crescere; accroître is to grow by an amount, and l’accroissement is that amount. Old French made a noun of its own from the same verb, creue, meaning an increase, a reinforcement, the fresh men sent to bring a company back up to strength. English borrowed it and wore it down to « crew ». So the people on a ship and the year of growth a forester measures are the same word underneath: something added to what was already standing there. It happened a second time with recrue, a new growth, which came into English as « recruit » — and French still calls a new soldier une recrue, feminine whoever he is. One more relative sits in plain sight on this page: croissant is simply the present participle of the verb, meaning « growing », and it named the waxing moon long before it named anything on a breakfast table.