finesse

Finesse comes from Middle English finesse, meaning both 'a degree of excellence' and, when speaking of metal, 'fineness, purity.' That in turn traces to Middle French and Old French finesse ('a fineness; a delicacy; slenderness'), built from fine/fin ('fine, thin'), itself from Latin fīnis ('an end'), plus the noun-forming suffix -esse.

The word began by measuring the purity of metal and the excellence of things generally, and the verb use grew later out of the noun.

It shares its root with fine, both descending from the same fine/fin ancestor meaning 'fine, thin.'