The French verb meant to seize between, and its earliest uses described acts of war.
The word entrepreneur is borrowed from French, where entreprendre means to undertake. The verb itself traces to Old French, documented by the twelfth century, built from entre- (between) and prendre (to take), which descended from Latin prehendere, to seize.1
The earliest French uses of entreprendre described military campaigns. Surrounding a town was an entreprise, a venture combining strategy, organization, and risk.2
The word crossed into economic vocabulary through Richard Cantillon, an Irish-French economist whose Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, published posthumously around 1730, gave the term its first formal definition in economic theory. For Cantillon, the entrepreneur was someone who bore risk by engaging in business without certainty of profit.3
The word entered English around the mid-eighteenth century. Merriam-Webster dates its first known English use to 1762.4 Its earliest English meaning was a manager or promoter of theatrical productions.
Jean-Baptiste Say, writing in the early nineteenth century, expanded the definition to someone who shifts economic resources from lower to higher productivity.5 Joseph Schumpeter, in the twentieth century, placed the entrepreneur at the center of economic theory as the agent of "creative destruction." The word had traveled from siege warfare to the engine of capitalism in three centuries.
English had once had its own equivalent. "Undertaker" carried the same meaning, someone who undertakes a venture, before the word narrowed to its current funerary sense. The French loanword filled the gap. In German, Schumpeter used Unternehmer, which translates directly as one who undertakes.