Envoyé

Envoyé is a French noun derived from the past participle of the verb envoyer, meaning sent or dispatched. The word literally denotes a person who has been sent on a mission, often with a diplomatic or official purpose. In contemporary usage it can describe diplomats, ambassadors, or delegated representatives, but it also persists in sporting contexts, most notably in tennis, where a ball that hits the net in the service line and lands in the correct service box is called an envoyé, a term that entered the English language through early 20th‑century tennis reporting.

The lexeme is grammaticalised in French: it is masculine (envoyé) and can be pluralized as envoyés. In French orthography, the acute accent is retained only in the certified form of the past participle of envoyer (envoyé) due to the rule that a past participle ending in -é is not stem‑mutable when the auxiliary is avoir. Thus, “un joueur a envoyé un message” does not become “envoyé”. An envoyé in diplomatic terms is formally titled envoy, a minister plenipotentiary, or sometimes envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, standing below an ambassador in the rank of diplomatic representatives.

In English, the term “envoy” has an independent history, but “envoyé” remains a specific French loanword, largely confined to tennis terminology. The word is used in dictionary entries, word‑of‑the‑day discussions, and lexical comparisons, illustrating the influence of French on both legal and sporting languages.