Origins
The English verb 'receive' belongs to one of the most prolific Latin word families to enter English: the descendants of 'capere,' meaning 'to take' or 'to seize.' This single Latin verb, compounded with various prefixes, generated an extraordinary number of English words — receive, perceive, conceive, deceive, achieve, and many more — all of which entered English through Old French during and after the Norman Conquest.
The Latin verb 'recipere' was formed from the prefix 're-' (back, again) and 'capere' (to take), giving a literal meaning of 'to take back' or 'to regain.' In classical Latin usage, it covered a wide semantic range: recovering property, welcoming guests, accepting responsibility, and withdrawing (as in the reflexive 'se recipere,' to betake oneself back). This breadth of meaning carried forward into the Romance descendants.
In Old French, 'recipere' underwent the regular phonological changes that transformed Latin into the Romance languages. The intervocalic 'p' of 'capere' voiced to 'v' (a standard Gallo-Romance sound change), producing forms like 'recoivre' and later 'receivre.' When this word entered Middle English after 1066, it appeared as 'receiven,' eventually standardized as 'receive.'
Middle English
The spelling of 'receive' illustrates one of English's most notorious orthographic irregularities: the 'ei' after 'c' violates the popular mnemonic 'i before e except after c' — or rather, 'receive' is the very word that inspired that rule. The 'ei' spelling reflects the Anglo-Norman pronunciation and was standardized by the fifteenth century, though Middle English manuscripts show considerable variation including 'receyve,' 'resseyve,' and 'receave.'
The PIE root *keh₂p- (to grasp) is one of the most productive roots in the Indo-European family. Beyond the Latin 'capere' branch, it produced Old English 'habban' (to have), Gothic 'haban,' and through Germanic, the modern English 'have' and 'heave.' The connection between 'receive' and 'have' — both from the same PIE root but entering English by completely different routes (Latin vs. Germanic) — is one of etymology's more elegant demonstrations of how a single prehistoric root can diverge into seemingly unrelated modern words.
The legal and formal connotations of 'receive' have been present since its earliest English usage. In law, a 'receiver' has meant a person appointed to hold disputed property since the fourteenth century. In criminal slang dating to the sixteenth century, 'receiving' specifically meant accepting stolen goods — a usage that became formalized in English criminal law as 'receiving stolen property.' The word's association with passive acceptance, as opposed to active taking, was already established in Latin 'recipere' and has persisted throughout its history.