MONETIZING CATTLE

I've always liked the word pecuniary ("of, or pertaining to, money"), and I like it even more now that I know its scintillating origin. The term was borrowed at the turn of the sixteenth century from Latin pecuniarius, which basically had the same definition. The root is pecunia​, meaning "wealth", and that is from pecu, meaning "cattle". That might seem like a leap first, but makes more sense when you consider that livestock was a way to measure wealth in old times, so we went from "cattle" to "wealth in cattle" to "wealth". Pecu, probably through Proto-Italic, comes from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction peku, also "cattle". Usage of the word pecuniary in literature over time peaked in 1840 and has been decreasing since then, but it is still a beautiful word with a beautiful etymology.