tariff

A tariff is a tax on imported or exported goods, or more precisely, it is a schedule of such tax rates for various types of goods. The word is also used more generally to mean a fee or charge. It was borrowed into English from the Italian tariffa in the late sixteenth century. The Italian word, in turn, comes from the Arabic تَعْرِفَة (ta’rif), meaning notification. As such, it clearly comes out of the lingua franca of cross-Mediterranean trade of the period.

But tariff first appears in an English context in the sense of a table or schedule more generally. That is in Garrard and Hitchcock’s 1591 Arte of Warre, where the authors use it to mean a table of the soldiers in a unit (in present-day U.S. Army jargon a Table of Organization and Equipment or TO&E). In this book it is clear that the word had not yet been fully anglicized as it is in italics and a synonym, table, also provided. Many English military terms were borrowed from Continental languages in the Early Modern period, so the Italian source isn’t surprising:

So that helping your memorie with certain Tablei or Tariffas made of purpose to know the numbers of the souldiers that are to enter into ranke, and what number of rankes will performe the iust square, you can neuer erre, but vpon any sodaine, set in battell any number of souldiers whatsoeuer.

The following year we see the word used in the context of taxation, but here it seems to refer to general taxes, not those on imports or exports. It is in a 3 October 1592 letter from English diplomat Henry Wooton to Edward la Zouche, 11th Baron Zouche. (Digression: Zouche was one of the commissioners at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots and was the lone vote against her death sentence.) Again, tariff is not fully anglicized; it is highlighted and is in the context of taxes on Italian cities:

The book that I put to be copied for your Honour is not yet ended, nor the tariffa of all the towns in the Grand Duke’s territories, in my hands; for which I have tarried eight days in Florence longer than my determination.

And the word appears in John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes:

Tariffa, arithmetike or casting of accounts.

All these early examples are of an Italian word being used in an English-language text. But by the end of the seventeenth century the word had been fully anglicized and the specific sense of a schedule of taxes on imports and exports was in place. We seen this with the word’s appearance in the 1699 slang dictionary, A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew:

Tariff, a Book of Rates or Customs; also another of the Current Coin.

Sources:

B.E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, London: For W. Hawes, P. Gilbourne, and W. Davis, 1699, sig. L8r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, 413/1. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Garrard, William and R. Hitchcock. The Arte of Warre. London: John Charlewood and William Howe for Roger Warde, 1591, 224. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tariff, n.

Wotton, Henry. Letter to Edward la Zouche, 11th Baron Zouche, 3 October 1592.  In Logan Pearsall Smith, ed. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, vol. 1 of 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907, 288–89. Archive.org.

Image credit: Paramount Pictures, 1986. Fair use of a single, low-resolution still from a motion picture to illustrate the topic under discussion.