A shipping agent, particularly if employed by a company like UPS, arrives dressed in livery. If you check the license plate on their vehicle, in some cases it says “livery.” “Livery,” which has nothing to do with “liver,” is from the French word “leveré.” It was delivered into English sometime in the 1300s, and has had several meanings over the centuries. But no matter how its usage has changed, it has always kept the core idea — which it had in the original French as well — of something being brought to someone to be given or handed over.
At first, back in Old French, it had to do with rationing food. The granting of your daily allowance was “leveré,” which at the time might have been spelled “livrée.” Its first usage in English had to do with the formal handing over of real property (land, that is) to someone. This operation was conducted by an official (probably just a servant in those days, since the “office” being represented was a member of the landed nobility). The official, just to make things more official, would wear some sort of uniform. Within a century or so, the uniform itself became known as “livery.”
After that — who can keep all the details of this or that uniform memorized anyway — “livery” came to mean any sort of uniform. This is one of the meanings that it still retains today. But during the 1400s, the meaning of “livery” got a little bit wobbly. It was used to mean specifically an army uniform, then the army itself, then any bunch of people mingled together for any reason, then, returning to its military association, the army’s quarters or barracks. By the 1600s, “livery” was used to mean the colors of…well, anything. Another odd usage appeared in the mid-1500s when “livery” meant the allowance or stipend granted to a church leader. The allowance granted to an academic professor was included as well at some point. At various other times “livery” has also meant the group of servants who were the staff of a noble household, the clothes worn by those servants even when they weren’t exactly “uniforms,” and, probably connected to its usage for military uniforms, “livery” meant “badge.” “Badge” here probably doesn’t mean a metal star you pin to your flannel shirt with trembling hands when you become the Sheriff in Tombstone, Arizona and go out to face the Dalton Gang — it’s any sort of insignia or symbolic mark.
“Livery” has also been used in a figurative sense to mean any sort of distinguishing characteristic of, say, an emotion: “sorrow’s livery dims the air” (1813), a virtue: “white (the livery of innocence)” (1661), and “love and charity, which is the only livery of a Christian man” (1563). It was even used (recently!) to describe a bird: “magpies are thumpingly obvious birds, in their garish co-respondent livery” (1991).
The “livery” designation on a vehicle registration is an outgrowth of the longstanding practice of placing emblems or using color schemes to indicate that a vehicle is either for hire (to be used, like a taxi, to “deliver you” to your destination), or engaged in delivery (such as a UPS truck). This practice has persisted across centuries of different sorts of vehicles, from carts to wagons to railroad cars, and now trucks, vans, and limousines.
You’d think, of course, that since it’s difficult to even talk about “livery” without using “deliver,” that “deliver” is simply “liver” with the addition of the prefix “de-.” But oddly enough, it isn’t. “Deliver” also comes from French, but not from “leveré.” “Deliver” comes from “deslivrer,” which itself is derived from the Latin “līberāre,” meaning to set free or liberate. Although in today’s mercantile age the most common meaning of “delivery” is “bringing me the stuff I ordered,” the much longer historical usage of “deliver” is around the original Latin sense of being liberated, rescued, or saved. This is the sense of “deliver” in everything from the 1325 “Richard Coer de Lyon”: “Whenne I am servyd off that fee, Thenne schal Richard delyveryd bee” to Daniel Defoe’s A New Voyage Round the World, by a Course Never Sailed Before in 1725: “The Way turn’d short East..and delivered us intirely from the Mountains.”
Another persistent usage of “deliver,” at least in England, was “deliver a gaol” (jail), which meant to empty out all the prisoners and bring all of them to trial at the same time. This practice had to do with the practice where trial judges would travel between towns to preside, so “the trial” was held, for example, on the second Tuesday of the month if you were in the village of Mugwump. And during the trial, of course, all the accused would “deliver themselves” of their stories, in the same sense that Martino Martini used it in 1654: “He delivered himself thus unto them, ‘I hope by your valour to obtain the Empire of the world’.” Whereupon the judge would deliver both verdicts and sentences much like Abraham Fleming meant it in his Panoplie of Epistles in 1576: “To a question by him propounded, this answere was delivered.”
But back to “livery.” There are two more somewhat unexpected ways the word has been used. One, which is obsolete, has to do with a low-grade kind of wool, as carefully described in 1749 by William Ellis: “There are nine Sorts of Wool contained in one good Fleece, which to make out, they say, that there are five Sorts for making Cloth, and four for Combings; a superfine Wool, a head Wool, Downrights, Seconds, and Livery.” And the other, which really is a different word as well as being an adjective instead of a noun, just means “resembles liver.” This meaning isn’t obsolete at all; it appeared in a review in The Guardian in 2006: “Good to see beef onglet on the menu (a hanger steak in the US). It is tough, irregular, sinewy, but the great payoff is a rich, livery flavour, well in evidence here.” Presumably the steak had been delivered to the reviewer by a waitperson dressed in livery.
