Bill or Bull?

My wife was muttering that the mail consisted mostly of bills when I wondered where that sense of bill came from, and a visit to the OED (entry revised 2024!) showed me that it’s complicated. The original sense was “A formal document containing a petition to a person in authority; a written petition” (1384 “A bille sholde be put vp be the comunes conseyl, to aske of the forseyde Sir John the mone that he had borwed in tyme of hys mairalte”); it quickly came to mean “A proposed law presented to a legislative body for enactment” (1411 “Lord the Roos, at the last parlement of oure sayd liege lord..compleyneth hym by a bille”) and other sorts of documents, legal and otherwise, in particular:

5.a. A printed or written statement listing goods or services supplied and the amount of money owed; an invoice.

Not common in North American use in the context of restaurants or bars, where check is the usual term.

Though often used interchangeably with invoice, bill is more commonly used for retail goods or services requiring immediate payment, whereas invoice often denotes a more detailed statement used especially in trade contexts for transactions having longer payment terms.

See also electricity bill, gas bill n. (b), tax bill n., telephone bill n., water bill n. (b), etc.

I like the careful semantic disentanglement; the first citation is:

1420 I will þat William Tropmell, taillour,..and Hunt, brouderere, be paied of their billes for makyng off a liuerey.
in F. J. Furnivall, Fifty Earliest English Wills (1882) 53

But it’s the messy etymology I especially want to share:

Partly (i) < Anglo-Norman bille written accusation (1292), bill, petition, formal document (all 1297), financial account, statement of money owed for goods, services, etc. (a1298), inventory, schedule, list (1321), papal bull (1402),

and partly (ii) post-classical Latin billa note of receipt (frequently from 1283 in British sources), petition, bill of complaint (frequently from c1290 in British sources), tab, label, inventory, list, schedule (frequently from 1294 in British sources), warrant (frequently from 1301 in British sources), petition to the king (from 14th cent. in British sources),

both of uncertain origin (see note).

Notes

Further etymology

Post-classical Latin billa and its likely etymon Anglo-Norman bille probably ultimately reflect a specific use (in Anglo-Norman) of Old French bille piece of wood (see billet n.²), as applied to a wooden tab or tally.

Alternatively, Anglo-Norman bille could be seen as a variant of bulle ‘round-shaped seal, document bearing a round-shaped seal’ (< post-classical Latin bulla: see bull n.²), although the variation is difficult to account for; it could perhaps show influence from Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French bille small ball (1164; see byles n.). (A variant form with ‑i‑ is quite unlikely to have arisen originally in English (i.e. in bull n.², < Anglo-Norman bulle) as a result of an unrounding of /y/ to /i/, and to have been subsequently borrowed into Anglo-Norman and Latin, partly because of the chronology of attestation, and partly because the change of short /y/ (spelt u in French) to /i/ is uncommon in French loans in Middle English, as opposed to in words of Old English and early Scandinavian origin.) In addition to these formal difficulties, the possibility of an origin of Anglo-Norman bille ‘document, certificate’ in bulle ‘document under a round seal’ is also brought into doubt on semantic grounds by early evidence: Anglo-Norman bille and post-classical Latin billa show considerable semantic difference from bulle and bulla respectively, with the former words referring to lists, schedules, accounts, legal documents, and laws, while the latter refer chiefly to documents under a round seal (usually those issued by the papal office). A partial semantic overlap between bill n.³ and bull n.² (and between the corresponding pairs of words in Anglo-Norman and Latin) appears to be a later development, starting in the later 14th cent.; compare post-classical Latin bulla in the sense ‘royal or parliamentary petition or bill’ (from 1382 in British sources), and also sense 2a of this word. Compare also billet n.¹ and bullet n.², and see discussion at those entries.

Etymology is hard work, once you get beyond the obvious!