Salary

The English word salary arrived in the fourteenth century from Anglo-French salarie, itself from Latin salārium, a fixed payment to holders of civil or military posts.1 The connection to Latin sal, meaning salt, is etymologically genuine. What remains uncertain, and widely mythologized, is what that connection originally meant.

The popular story is that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, or received a salt allowance, and that this is the origin of the word. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, mentioned in his Natural History that "in former times a soldier was paid with salt."2 No other ancient source corroborates the claim. Classicist Peter Gainsford has shown that the phrase salarium argentum, often translated as "salt money," was an invention of eighteenth-century Latin dictionaries, not an attested ancient expression.3

Merriam-Webster notes that the assumption of a "salt money" origin is popular but "has no basis in ancient sources."4 The most likely explanation is that salārium was a euphemism, a term of understatement applied to official stipends that were far larger than the cost of purchasing salt. The word may have originally described an allowance for salt among other supplies, or it may have been metaphorical from the start.

In Spanish, salario descends directly from the same Latin root. The Dutch word soldij, meaning military pay, derives instead from the gold coin solidus, linking compensation to currency rather than commodity. The English expression "worth your salt," meaning worthy of your pay, preserves the association that the etymology makes visible, even if the history it implies is more legend than record.