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
In English, the term “envoy” has an independent history, but “envoyé” remains a specific French loanword, largely