valet [ME] Rich men who could afford to employ a valet to look after their clothes had to be careful that he was also not a varlet, ‘an unprincipled man’, a sense that developed in the mid 16th century, as the words are essentially the same. French valet ‘attendant’ and its early variant varlet are related to vassal [ME], from medieval Latin vassallus ‘retainer’, which derived from a Celtic word. The first valets were servants or footmen who acted as attendants on a knight.