Does the word “salary” really come from salt?

The money you earn each month is your salary, a word so well traveled that it has even settled into Japanese as sararīman (サラリーマン), “salaryman.” Perhaps you’ve heard that the word salary comes from “salt”: Roman soldiers were paid in salt, the story goes, so the word for salt came to mean wages.

Considering how precious salt once was, it sounds entirely plausible. It turns up regularly in books and on trivia websites. Historians, however, take a rather more cautious view.

A word that really was born from salt

Let’s start with what is certain. The English word salary derives from the Latin salarium. And most dictionaries and scholars agree that salarium is related to sal, the Latin word for salt. So far, the popular story holds up.

The question is why a word connected with salt came to mean pay. From here on, reliable records suddenly become scarce.

Were Roman soldiers really paid in salt?

A Roman soldier’s pay was called the stipendium, and it was paid in coin. Records from the time tell us a fair amount about how much soldiers earned and how the cost of food and equipment was deducted from it. Yet no ancient source has been found stating that soldiers were paid in actual salt.

The evidence most often cited is the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist of the first century. In a passage on the importance of salt, Pliny writes that the word salarium, meaning a salary, derives from salt. But he does not go so far as to say that soldiers received salt itself as payment. It has also been pointed out that some passages circulating online as quotations from Pliny cannot be found in the original text.

So what was a salarium originally? One theory says it was an allowance for buying salt; another links it to guarding the Via Salaria, the “Salt Road” along which salt was transported. None of these is conclusive, and nobody really knows. The salt origin of the word is solid, but the story bridging salt and pay seems to owe a great deal to the imagination of later generations.

“A word that comes from salt” and “wages paid in salt” may sound alike, but they are entirely different claims.

Salt’s relatives on the dinner table

Setting wages aside for a moment, the descendants of Latin sal are actually all over our dinner tables.

Take salad. Because vegetables were eaten sprinkled with salt, the word is thought to come from a term meaning “salted.” Sauce and salsa also trace back to a word meaning something seasoned with salt. And sausage is said to descend from a Latin word for salted meat. The act of salting food became the very name of the dish.

Salt was essential both for preserving food and for flavoring it; it was quite literally a basic of daily life. That is surely why these words were born and have lasted so long.

“Soldier” comes from gold, not salt

There’s another word that often gets mixed up in all this: soldier. Because it sounds a little like salary, people tend to assume it, too, comes from salt. In fact, it is said to derive from the solidus, a gold coin of the later Roman Empire. Its original sense was someone who fights for pay.

So the word for a soldier comes from money, and the word for pay comes from salt. The history of words sometimes reaches us with a twist like this.