Farming and food

Halfway down this list sits la denrée, the ordinary French word for a foodstuff, and there is a coin inside it. Old French had denerée, the amount of goods that one denier would buy, and the denier was the Latin denarius, the silver piece a Roman soldier was paid in. The word therefore began as a measure of money and ended as the name of the thing bought: les denrées alimentaires on a customs form, une denrée périssable on a lorry, and une denrée rare said of anything in short supply, patience included. English holds the same coin from two other directions. Until decimalisation a penny was written « d. », and that « d. » was the denarius, twelve of them to the shilling, which is why the old prices look like nothing a pound could contain. And the fineness of a stocking is still counted in « denier », a unit named after the weight of that same small coin. So English kept the money and the thread, while French moved the word quietly onto the shelf, where the coin has turned into the groceries.