(noun) a tax on imported goods

We old trade hands spent years telling people trade policy wasn’t about tariffs any more. Tariffs around the world were low and falling, we said. Trade barriers these days were all about complex technical regulations, we said. And then came the soi-disant “Tariff Man” Donald Trump to return trade policy to a simpler, more brutal era.

When Trump calls “tariff” the most beautiful word in the English language— “it’s more beautiful than love, it’s more beautiful than anything” — he probably isn’t thinking of its romantically serpentine etymology. It has come to us from a term originally used by Arab traders to mean a notification or an inventory, via some combination of Persian, Turkish, Italian and French routes — the bountiful interchange of medieval Mediterranean commerce embodied in a single word.