1667: customs and customers Jul 8, 2019

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A people can have their own customs, stores want customers, and boarders have custom-officers, but those things are not really related at first glance. This is because in the 14th century, the word that became 'customer' meant a 'tax collector', but then got applied to people who did business in guilds generally. This lead to the sense of that word as someone who is an official inspector, and someone who buys things, but it was later in the word's history later that came to refer to someone doing something habitually, and the idea of a 'custom' followed, but eventually stopped describing the act of regular business transactions.
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