Other forms: envelopes
An envelope is the paper pocket a letter travels in. Brown ones for bills, white ones for cards, and the padded sort you end up tearing open with your teeth because the flap will not give.
You address an envelope, seal it, stamp it, and drop it in the box. Keep it apart from envelop — no final e, stress on the second syllable — which is the verb for wrapping something completely: fog envelops the hills. In an office, a brown envelope is a bribe, cash handed over with nothing written down anywhere. Two fixed phrases reach well beyond stationery: a back-of-the-envelope calculation is a rough sum scribbled in a minute, and to push the envelope is to go right up to the edge of what is possible and lean on it, from the flight envelope, the limits inside which an aircraft is safe.
1nounenvelopeThe flat paper cover a letter or card is sent in.~44%
“She wrote the address on the envelope and licked the flap.”
2nounlayerAny outer layer that wraps or encloses something.~50%
“Each seed sits inside a soft envelope.”
3nounlimitThe outer limit of what a machine or a system can safely do.~6%
“Test pilots spend their working lives at the edge of the envelope.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 167 sentences found in the wild and placed 161 of them on a sense (6 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
envelope is a paper container.
It is the French enveloppe, the wrapping — the noun made from envelop, which is Old French en- plus voloper, to wrap up. Further back sits a root meaning to turn or to bend: something wound round and round a thing until the thing is covered. An envelope is not really a container. It is a wrapping that stayed folded.
Proto-Indo-European
*werb-
French
enveloppe
English, today
envelope
From French enveloppe. The engineering sense is derived from flight envelope. The verb is from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA