Warehousing and order picking in French

Le stockage aléatoire is chaotic storage, where an item goes wherever there is a gap, and the word French picked for it is a throw of the dice. Aléatoire comes from Latin alea, the die, and French still keeps the bare noun l’aléa for anything you cannot plan around: les aléas de la météo, les aléas du chantier. English owns « aleatory » too, but only music and law ever reach for it, so the warehouse word here is « random ». And « random » carries a French passport of its own. It arrived in Middle English as randoun, from Old French randon, a headlong rush: à randon meant at full tilt, and the idea of aimlessness grew out of the speed rather than the other way round. That old word never died in French. It is alive as une randonnée, a long walk in the hills, and un randonneur, the person taking it. So the two languages name one shelf policy from two pictures: French from the gaming table, English from a gallop that slowed down, in French, into a ramble.