Hiring a tradesman

L’immatriculation au répertoire des métiers is the entry that turns somebody into a registered tradesman, and the noun inside it has a longer memory than it looks. It is built on le matricule, from Late Latin matricula, a public register or roll; matricula is the diminutive of matrix, whose first meaning was the womb, and it is the administrative sense that travelled. French still uses the word for anything that has to be written into an official list: la plaque d’immatriculation on a car, l’immatriculation au registre du commerce for a company, le numéro matricule of a soldier or a prisoner, and here the entry that lets a plumber invoice at all. English borrowed the same verb and then spent it on one thing only. To « matriculate » is to be entered on the books of a university, and « matriculation » is that formality and nothing else. So the French sentence enrols a tradesman where the nearest English word enrols a student, and the tradesman has to make do with « registration ».