lever — TO RAISE

[leu-VEH] (v.) Post-Revolution, burgeoning American states needed to raise money. Luckily, cash crops like tobacco, cotton and corn were being grown and governments took their share: they levied taxes on produced goods. The term was taken from the French word verb lever, which means to raise. The U.S. raised taxes. In its rabid absorption of foreign words, English has never shied away from reinventing meaning. Strangely, the French verb lever (to raise) also turned into the English noun lever (the rigid object used to raise large things with little force) and somehow the r became audible.