Money makes the world go round and cash is king.  The word cash appeared in English right around the time of Shakespeare, and he, being right on top of this language thing, used it.

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In Henry V two soldiers discussing gambling debts mention it.  Shakespeare wasn’t the first to use it but I mention him for a reason.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

During the same period the word cash held the meaning of a “box to keep money in.”  Both meanings had existed in French and Italian before coming into English. The “box” meaning was the original but has disappeared from English now.

So, someone referring to a cash box is being redundant if you look at it etymologically.

The Oxford English Dictionary draws on two sources for its etymology.

One of these thinks the word came into English from French.  That’s the thinking of Randle Cotgrave.  He wrote A dictionarie of the French and English tongues and I’ve mentioned him before a few times on podictionary.

The other theory is that cash came to English from Italian.  The guy who held this opinion was John or Giovanni Florio and he wrote an Italian-English dictionary that he called A World of Words.

It doesn’t much matter whether Cotgrave was right or Florio, since in either case the Latin root of cash would be caspa meaning “case” or “container.”

I mentioned Shakespeare and it just so happens that both of these bilingual dictionary makers lived during William Shakespeare’s lifetime.  Some people say Shakespeare and Florio must have been friends.

We don’t know that, but since they both enjoyed the patronage of the earls of Southampton and Pembroke it is very likely that they knew each other.

Shakespeare seems to have known Florio’s work too since in Love’s Labour’s Lost he quotes an Italian proverb verbatim from Florio’s work.

Those soldiers of Shakespeare’s from Henry V; they mentioned cash and they would have collected their weapons from a cache.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, if those two words cash and cache are related.

The dictionaries say it isn’t so.

Evidently cache the storage or hiding place is instead from the French word “to hide.”