Cache and Cachet

This thing really has cachet! Or is it cache? And how do you say that, again?

Cache and cachet are two words that sound like they share the same root word, and I’ve learned that it’s worth pulling that etymological thread whenever you see this sort of coincidence.

Cachet—pronounced “cash-AY”—traces its origin to the Latin word coactare, which means “to constrain.” Over time, this started drifting to mean something like to press together.

In Old French, coactare gave birth to the word cachier, meaning "to press or crowd," and later acquired the meaning "to hide." This meaning, too, drifted over the centuries to mean something more like a seal or a stamp, ultimately pressing the letter together, and concealing what was inside.

This cash-AY word entered English with this meaning around a thousand years ago, and this meaning broadened to include something more metaphorical. If a letter was important because it had a cachet on it, then perhaps a person who was important also had cachet.

Cache—pronounced “cash”—started in the same place as “cash-AY”, but branched off from that same old French word cachier, but things get interesting around the 17th century. At this point, fur trading was the biggest business in North America, and ambitious French fur trappers had made their way across the Atlantic in their quest for wealth.

They brought their language with them, and one word in particular proved sticky with the English-speaking traders: cache. The French still said it with that AY at the end, but instead of the seal of a letter, they meant the places they used to hide provisions and essential supplies.

The English speakers of North America, in what is today Canada and the United States, took the ball and ran with it. That AY sound at the end of the word seemed like something extra, so people just dropped it and started calling any type of hidden storage place a cache.

Today, you might have to clean your cache on your web browser in order to get things to work properly.

Okay, but what about cash? That’s a much more common word than either of the other two, and it sounds so similar.

In this case, cash isn’t in the same family of words as cache and cachet after all, but there are some interesting parallels anyway. If you go back far enough, you get to Latin once again. Capsa means “box” in Latin.

In Old Italian, this was pronounced cassa, and this became caisse in Middle French. Caisse still meant a box for storage, and that’s where we get the modern word case today, but it also began to mean a box that stored money.

In the same way that the cachet (the seal on the letter) came to mean prestige itself, caisse eventually came to mean the valuable contents inside. So, while cash does not share a common origin with cache or cachet, it does have a similar linguistic transformation story.

Cash, cache, and cachet are all finance words with an interesting etymological story, but they’re far from the only ones. I wrote about others recently, and you might enjoy reading that next: