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Monsieur Herpin, a French stamp collector, was looking for an impressive and learned-sounding term for his hobby. Because the Greeks and Romans did not have postage stamps, there was no classical term for them. So he went back a stage beyond stamps, to the days of franking with a postmark. In France, such letters were marked with the words franc de port "carriage-free." The nearest he could get to this in Greek was ateleia, and from it he created philatélie, the English form of which made its first recorded appearance in 1865.
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