Other forms: messengers
A messenger is somebody who carries word from one person to another. Send a messenger, the messenger arrived, shoot the messenger.
Don't shoot the messenger asks that the bearer of bad news not be blamed for it, and the plea is ancient. In biology, messenger RNA carries instructions from the gene to the place proteins are built. Note the extra n, which crept into message on the way.
1nounmessengerSomebody who carries word from one person to another.
“The king sent a messenger to warn the next town that the enemy was coming.”
messenger is a carrier of news.
Old French messagier comes from message, from Latin mittere, to send. The n in the English is an intruder.
Old French
messanger
Middle English
messengere
English, today
messenger
Built from
From Middle English messengere, messingere, messangere, from Old French messanger, a variant of Old French messagier (French messager), equivalent to message + -er. a doublet of messager. Displaced native boda and ǣrendraca (“messenger, ambassador”). For the replacement of -ager with -enger, -inger, -anger, compare passenger, harbinger, scavenger, porringer. This development may have been merely the addition of n, or it may have resulted due to contamination from other suffixes such as Middle English -ing and the rare Old French -ange, -enc, -inge, -inghe (“-ing”) for Old French -age (“-age”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA