Post office and bank

The list for two counters. Two of its entries, encaisser and le caissier, hold a word an English reader uses every day without knowing where it came from. « Cash » is French la caisse, from Latin capsa, a box — the word named the *container*, and English gave the name to what was inside it. French kept the box: la caisse is the till, the cash desk, and by extension a fund — la caisse d’allocations familiales — while the money itself is les espèces or, informally, le liquide. So payer en espèces is to pay cash, and payer en caisse is to pay at the till. Le caissier is literally « cashier », the person at the box. And English then needed a new word for the box, which is why it has « till ». One more sense to have: encaisser un coup is to take a blow, which is where the box becomes the body.