Livery

Dear Word Detective: How did the name “livery stable” come about as a place for boarding horses? — Carol Iraggi.

That’s a good question, and one that leads to some interesting places. But before we get started, I should explain that “livery” in the “stable” sense has nothing to do with “liver,” the yucky organ that secretes bile to break down your Big Macs into the little particles that clog your veins. There is, however, a fairly obscure term “livery” which means either “of the color of liver” (a dark blue-black) or “showing symptoms of a malfunctioning liver,” mainly crankiness, a condition more often called being “liverish.” The organ kind of “liver” is derived from a very old Germanic root, also the source of “livid,” literally meaning “turning blue (or purple) with rage.”

In addition to “livery stable,” a facility where horses are kept, modern English uses “livery” primarily to mean the distinctive uniform or insignia worn by servants of the wealthy or attendants of royalty. No proper “bodice-ripper” (romance novel) would be complete, for instance, without at least one reference to some sleazoid Duke’s servant sporting “footman’s livery” as he assists the heroine down from her carriage. On a more mundane level, the distinctive uniforms worn by employees of upscale hotels and restaurants could be described as “livery,” especially if one wished to avoid the stigma of the word “uniform.” I guess if the entrees are more than $50, that waiter’s get-up is “livery.”

For a word associated with high-class wage slavery and big horses kept in small stalls, “livery” has a surprising origin. It’s ultimately derived from the Latin verb “liberare,” meaning “to set free” (also the source of our modern English “liberate”). The Old French derivative “livrer” meant “to dispense, hand over,” and took on the specific meaning, in the Anglo-French “livere,” of “clothes and food dispensed to servants by their master.” When “livery” first appeared in English in the late 13th century, it carried this meaning of “ration or allowance given to servants.” For servants who worked within the view of the master and his guests, and were issued some sort of uniform, “livery” came to mean these specialized clothes by the 14th century. By the 15th century, “livery” was being used to mean the food and other upkeep of horses, especially the amount paid for boarding a horse at a “livery” (aha!) stable. So today a “livery stable” is called that because the monthly boarding charge covers feed, grooming and all the other horsie necessities.

Interestingly, that Latin root of “livery,” “liberare,” also produced another English word that bears a strong resemblance to “livery” — “delivery,” which originally meant “to free from” (as the Lord’s Prayer says “Deliver us from evil”). Our modern FedEx sense of “deliver” comes from a 13th century extension of the word meaning “to hand over, transfer to the custody of another person.”