Error sticks to the word taxi like an ant to an echidna’s tongue. I once heard a cabby on the wireless explain that the word taxi came from its German inventor, whose name was Thurn und Taxis. This blunder swarms all over the internet. “At the end of the 18th century,” goes one version, “the Thurn und Taxis family, who managed thousands of carriages and horses with which they distributed mail, decided to diversify their business, using their network and their vehicles also for passenger transport… Their name, Taxis, may have inspired the modern term taxi…” But it didn’t. The Thurn und Taxis family did run international postal services. Their family names meant Tower and Badger, but they did not invent those either.
Another erroneous etymology is that taxi comes from the modern Greek taxidi, “a journey.” Taxidi comes from the same ancient Greek word that gives us taxonomy and taxidermy, but not taxi. A variant error is to derive taxi from ancient Greek tachys, “swift.” In fact taxi, originally taximeter cab, comes from German Taxameter, a device patented in 1890 to measure distance, to calculate fares. The tax- element was consciously derived from the late Latin taxa, “tariff.” Taximeter came into use in English to refer to the German innovation a decade before taximeter cab appeared in Britain in 1907 and was abbreviated to taxi.
I don’t know where my husband has put it, but I did possess a fat red book called The London Hackney Cab Fares and Distances: Giving nearly Thirteen Thousand Distances in Miles and Yards. These fares were priced at 6d a mile within four miles of Charing Cross. The book would have appealed to Branwell Brontë, who died five years before its first edition in 1853. He was reputed to have learned all the byways of London without going there. Earth, he might have thought, has not anything to show more fare.
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