Public offices and forms

The thirty-fifth entry is o guiché, taken by Portuguese from French guichet and worn down to the little window in a public office. English owns the same word and nobody would guess it, because the two arrived by different doors. Old Norman had wiket, a small door cut into a bigger one, the low gate a person steps through without opening the gate itself. English took it from the Normans as « wicket » and kept the sound: a wicket gate first, and later the target in cricket, named after the same small frame. Central French did to that w- what it did to every w- it received from Germanic, and turned it into gu-: the shift that leaves « war » beside guerre, « ward » beside garde, « William » beside Guillaume. So guichet and « wicket » are one word pronounced by two sets of mouths. What the Portuguese form keeps is the original idea, which is neither the counter nor the clerk behind it but the opening: a hole in a wall, just wide enough to pass a sheet of paper through.