Foundations and public benefit

The fourteenth entry is la ricevuta della donazione, and the first noun is worth a minute because English made a scar on its own version of it. La ricevuta is nothing but the feminine past participle of ricevere, the thing received, turned into a noun exactly as l’entrata, l’uscita and la veduta were. Our word set out from the same Latin recepta, reached us through Anglo-Norman, and for two centuries was written « receit », which is still what the mouth says. Then, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, scholars restored the consonant of recepta on the page, where it has sat ever since without ever being sounded. « Debt » and « doubt » were treated the same way, after debitum and dubitare. So the word for a small piece of paper handed across a counter carries a letter put there by people who wanted it to look Roman. One sense has fallen away since: « receipt » was for a long time the ordinary word for a cooking recipe, which is why an old book of receipts turns out to be a cookbook.