salary

What the Romans actually paid

Salarium appears in Roman sources as a payment, often to soldiers or officials, and it is connected with sal, salt. That much is agreed. What is not agreed is whether the payment was literally a salt allowance, a sum given so that the recipient could buy salt, or simply a word that had drifted into meaning any allowance at all.

The historian Pliny the Elder mentions salt as a payment in his Natural History, in a passage about the people who lived near the salt works, but he is describing an unusual arrangement rather than a general practice. The safest version of the story is the one the etymology supports: the word means "salt money", and what it bought in practice is a matter of scholarship.

From allowance to contract

In medieval England the Latin word arrived twice, once through the church and once through the courts, and settled as salarie in the records of the 1300s. At that point it meant a fixed sum paid at intervals for a service performed — a sense close to the modern one, though the social range was wider.

The word's meaning has been remarkably stable since. Salary never developed a slang sense, never became a metaphor, and never split into dialects. It simply names the thing it names, which is unusual for a common noun that has been in the language for seven hundred years.

• sal (Latin) — salt
• salarium — an allowance connected with salt
• salarie (Anglo-Norman French) — payment, recompense
• salarie (Middle English, 1300s) — a fixed payment for service
• salary (modern) — regular income from employment
• salaried — the adjective that marks a staff position rather than hourly work

Salt in the rest of English

The salt family in English is large and mostly invisible, because the Latin and the Germanic branches arrived separately. Salt itself came through Old English, while the learned words — saline, salinity, saliferous — came from Latin. Salad and salsa both descend from "salted" and entered from opposite ends of the Mediterranean.

One more relative is worth noticing for the confusion it causes. Soldier looks as though it should belong here, but it comes from solidus, a Roman gold coin, and means "one paid in solidi". It arrived at the same idea by a completely different road, which is why soldiers earn a salary without any salt in either word.