Business and finance in French

Tenth in this list stands le budget, which is less a loan from English than a word coming home. It set out in old French as bougette, a small leather bag, the diminutive of bouge, itself from Latin bulga. It crossed the Channel in the Middle Ages and kept that meaning: a pouch, and whatever was inside it. Then the pouch turned figurative. The Chancellor of the Exchequer carried the year’s accounts to Parliament in a bag, « to open the budget » came to mean setting out what the country would take in and spend, and within a century the word named the accounts rather than the bag. French had meanwhile dropped bougette altogether, so when it needed a name for the same parliamentary business in the eighteenth century it borrowed its own word back, spelling untouched. Nothing in le budget de l’atelier looks foreign today, and nothing in it looks like luggage. The bag survived on our side instead, in an unexpected place: « bulge » grew out of that same bulga and kept the shape of a full purse.