/rɪˈmɪt/
[verb] To send money to someone, especially to pay a bill or debt; it can also mean to cancel or reduce a punishment, or to refer a matter to someone else for a decision.
Before it ever meant sending money, 'remit' meant to send someone back to prison — a much darker errand.
The word 'remit' travels in a straight, confident line from Latin, carrying the same core idea across more than two thousand years. Its root is the Latin verb *mittere*, meaning 'to send' or 'to let go', combined with the prefix *re-*, meaning 'back' or 'again'. Together, *remittere* meant to send back, to release, or to slacken — as when a fever remits, it sends the illness back, releasing its grip on the body. This was a verb the Romans used in courts, in medicine, and in everyday life.
Latin *remittere* passed into Old French as *remettre*, keeping the same essential sense of sending something back or releasing it from an obligation. From Old French, the word crossed into Middle English in the 14th century, landing in the form we still recognise today. Early English users reached for it mainly in legal and religious writing, where 'to remit sins' meant to send them away — to forgive them entirely. This is the sense that appears in the Bible and in the writings of church scholars throughout the medieval period.
Over the 15th and 16th centuries, 'remit' began to stretch its meaning outward. Legal writers used it to describe sending a case back to a lower court — literally returning the matter to another authority. This sense of *delegation*, of passing something along to someone better placed to deal with it, became deeply embedded in the word. By the time English bureaucracy had grown into a proper institution, 'remit' was everywhere in official language, describing what a committee was allowed to do, or what a government office was responsible for.
The financial sense — sending money to pay a debt — emerged naturally from the same root idea of releasing an obligation. If you owe someone money and you send it to them, you are, in a sense, letting the debt go. This use became widespread during the expansion of international trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, when merchants routinely 'remitted' payment across borders. Today, 'remittance' — the noun form — is the word used in economics to describe money sent by workers living abroad back to their families at home, a financial reality for millions of people around the world.
The same Latin root *mittere* has given English an extraordinary family of words, all carrying that original idea of sending. Latin *mittere* → Old French *mettre* → English 'mission'; Latin *mittere* → Old French *commettre* → English 'commit'; Latin *admittere* → Old French *admettre* → English 'admit'; Latin *permittere* → Old French *permettre* → English 'permit'; and Latin *transmittere* → Old French *transmettre* → English 'transmit'. 'Remit' sits comfortably in this large and useful family, still doing the same essential work it did in Roman courts: releasing something from one hand and sending it into another.