Where does the word "post" come from? From royal horses to your letterbox
Published on 17 October 2026 · 3 min read
You "post" a card, you wait for the "mail", you stick on a "stamp", you look out for the "postman". Words you use without a second thought, yet each one carries centuries of history: horses ridden into the ground, leather sacks, a drum, and a French royal adviser whose idea came two hundred years too early.
Post: horses "placed" along the road
The word comes from the Italian posta, itself from the Latin positus, "placed". A post, originally, was neither an office nor a service: it was a relay, a spot placed along the road where an exhausted rider swapped his horse for a fresh one and rode straight on. In the late fifteenth century, Louis XI of France set up these relays on the kingdom's main roads, roughly every thirty kilometres. Fresh horses waited at every stage, and the king's orders crossed France at a speed nobody had seen before. The "postmasters" kept the relays, the "postilions" rode the horses. The network served the king alone: ordinary people had to wait until the early seventeenth century before they were allowed to slip their own letters into it. The post was born, and it kept the name of the horses.
Mail, courier, correo: a bag and a runner
"Mail" has a surprisingly down-to-earth origin: it comes from the Old French male, the leather bag letters were packed into for the journey. English kept the bag. French, Spanish and Portuguese kept the runner instead: courrier, correo and correio all come from "to run", because a courier was first a man who ran to carry messages, long before the word meant what he carried. As for the French facteur, the postman, it descends from the Latin factor, "the one who does", who acts on someone else's behalf. For a long time it meant a trading agent; the "facteur des postes" appeared in the eighteenth century and ended up keeping the name for himself.
The stamp: a drum, a bell, then a little square
The English "stamp" is plain enough: it comes from stamping, pressing a mark onto something. The French word, timbre, is stranger. It goes back to the Greek tympanon, the drum. In Old French a timbre was a bell struck with a hammer, then, by extension, the mark struck onto a document to make it official. When Britain issued the first adhesive stamp, the Penny Black, in 1840, and France followed in 1849 with the profile of the goddess Ceres, the French naturally called it a timbre-poste: the mark proving that postage had been paid. The drum became a little perforated square, but it kept its name. And the "timbre" of a voice is the very same word: what resonates.
The letterbox: an idea from 1653 that failed
In 1653, a Parisian state councillor, Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer, launched a "petite poste" within Paris. The principle was so modern it is almost disorienting: boxes fixed in the streets, where you dropped your letter together with a prepaid "port payé" ticket bought in advance, an ancestor of the stamp two centuries ahead of its time. The venture died within a few years, and legend has it that ill-wishers slipped mice into the boxes to chew up the mail. Letterboxes only settled in for good in the eighteenth century, and in France they turned yellow in the 1960s. But the idea was there: an object in the street, to which you entrust a few words for someone else.
What is left of all this in your card
When you send a card today, the horses are gone, the leather sack has become a plastic crate, and the drum has given way to a small rectangle in the top right corner. But the gestures remain: someone writes, someone carries, someone opens their box and finds a word from somewhere else. At UnCoucou we handle the "post" part in the literal sense: you pick your photo, write your message and enter an address in France or Monaco, and we print your card on thick premium paper and hand it to La Poste on our next dispatch, from €2.49 per card, stamp included. At the end of the road there is still someone hurrying along with your card in their bag. We still call them the postman.