deliver [ME] Deliver goes back to Latin liber ‘free’, which is also the source of *liberty. The word has been used for taking and handing over letters and goods since the late Middle Ages. The phrase to deliver the goods, ‘to provide what is promised and expected’, is from the USA, and the first known examples are from political debate in the 1870s. Highwaymen really did tell their victims to stand and deliver—the phrase is mentioned in an early 18th-century account of the lives of highwaymen.