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When you get a letter in the mail and it has fancy letterhead from some government agency or something you might say it’s an official letter.
At a sports event the people who make the calls are the officials.
In both these cases it’s official because the thing being represented is “the office.”
Office and official both go back through French to Latin where the roots of the words were ob ficium, literally meaning “toward doing” so an office is a place where things get done.
This Latin ficium shows up also in the phrase fait accompli meaning something “already done,” as well as in the word benefit meaning “good works” and also in the word edifice meaning “building works.”
When the word office first appeared in English 700 years ago it was used to mean an act that one was responsible for—something you were obliged to do—your duty to your children as a parent, to your subjects as a lord.
In particular the first citations were for the Divine Office. That is, the religious rites that were thought to be required by god.
Within 100 years this sense of something that one must do transposed itself into a parallel definition; office meaning the act of answering the call of nature.
It was Geoffrey Chaucer who first used the word office to refer to a place of work in a similar sense that we use today.
Chaucer being the first use the word in this way is particularly appropriate considering the earlier use in a church sense. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were filled with religious characters and some of these were particularly holy, but there were plenty who were not.
Chaucer seemed comfortable pointing out the flaws in the men and women of God and a writer of 350 years ago thought he knew why. According to Thomas Fuller, author of The Church History of Britain the source of Chaucer’s disregard for church officials was based on an urge for vengeance:
“Chaucer [was] fined in the Temple two shillings for striking a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street; and it seems his hands ever itched to be revenged and have his pennysworth out of them.”
Five days a week Charles Hodgson produces Podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, Thursday episodes here at OUPblog. He’s also the author of Carnal Knowledge – A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia as well as the audio book Global Wording – The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English.
Officium had the sense of duty and obligation in Latin. How did that meaning fail to come into French and English along with the word?