fee

Fee comes from Middle English fee, fe, feoh, from Old English feoh, meaning cattle, property, wealth, or payment. Its sense was later shaped by Old French fieu/fief, both ultimately from Proto-Germanic *fehu ("cattle, livestock"), itself from Proto-Indo-European *péḱu ("livestock").

The word began attached to actual livestock — the wealth measured in animals — and gradually widened to mean property and payment in general, before narrowing again to the sense of a charge or payment we use today.

It's a cognate of German Vieh and Dutch vee, both meaning cattle or livestock, and of Icelandic fé, which still carries the double sense of livestock and money — a reminder that wealth was once counted on four legs.