I think it’s usable for both the signing of a contract as well as the combined act of drafting and signing. Usually the sense of “creating” a legal document without signing it is referred to as “drafting” or “drawing up” the contract; I don’t think I’ve ever heard “inking” used in that sense.

You write it in ink, yes; but you also sign it in ink. That’s the more definitive and final action, and represents when a thing actually occurs.

For instance, a football player can “ink” a contract to play for a team; this is almost certainly meant in the “signed” sense, as the team almost certainly wrote it. And two companies can “ink” a contract to work together or merge or whatever, and almost certainly that contract was both written and signed by those companies’ representatives. But a lawyer who wrote a contract (like a will) which someone else signed wouldn’t have “inked” it, but rather “drawn it up.”

Doesn’t inking something mean you write it in ink

It can, but it can also be used as a colloquialism for ANY way of entering a contract, even digitally (with your fingers 😉)

Interesting question! I looked it up, and wow, it has a way weirder history than I thought.

The word comes from Latin, of course, and derives from the Latin “novus,” meaning “new” (and does indeed share a lineage with words like “supernova”).

Over time, Romans started to use “novella” (which is the diminutive plural of “novus,” so “little things that are new”) to refer to…well, items of news. Current events. “News,” incidentally, is the plural of “new,” so this shouldn’t be too surprising. (Side note: “novella” also has an agricultural meaning as a young shoot from a plant–it’s apparently still used today, in wineries–and I’ve seen some suggestion that that meaning is also a part of the etymology, but I haven’t seen it enough to really be confident with that.)

That meaning seems to have stayed fairly consistent for a long while, in that we didn’t really separate “fictional news” from “true news.” Fiction was only for the rich, anyway, and fictional stories were mostly called “romances” when they were called anything at all, referring to the fact that they were written romanice loqui–in vernacular Latin, in the language of the everyday Roman.

During the Middle Ages, a blurry line between truth and fiction led to using the term “novella” to mean “narratives,” whether real or imaginary, and especially when compiled into a collection. But in the mid-1300s, an Italian author named Giovanni Boccaccio published The Decameron, which was similar in both construction and literary impact to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, released just a few years later, and The One Thousand And One Nights, compiled centuries earlier. In Boccaccio’s book, Florentine plague survivors are hiding out in the countryside to escape the Black Death as it sweeps through Europe, and the ten of them each tell a story each day for ten days (hence, Deca-). Each of the hundred individual stories in The Decameron are called novella, and the book’s popularity led to the word “novella” being reinterpreted as “a fictional narrative” across Europe, supplanting the word “Romance” in most languages (which came to refer only to the love story that was at the core of a lot of chivalric tales). In French, the word was rendered “nouvelle,” which came into English as “novel.”

Another side note: even though “new” sounds like the beginning of “nouvelle,” while the two go back to the same Proto-Indo-European lemma, “new” comes to us by way of Germanic, not Latin. Ironically, the word “new” is pretty old; that PIE root is “néwos.”

But literacy (and printing) being what it was in the Middle Ages, the word “nouvelle” didn’t refer specifically to written stories until Cervantes. Don Quixote is widely considered to have been the first modern novel, and its release between 1605 and 1615 drew a dividing line between the “French” romance and the “Spanish” novel (from the same Latin root as “nouvelle,” but rendered in Spanish, of course), firmly defining the latter as a work of literature; at least in Spain. English novels likewise became written or printed stories in the mid-1700s, when novels like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and reprintings of Thomas More’s Utopia started to define the English novel. At that point, the French got into the game as well, with books like Voltaire’s Candide becoming a key part of the French Enlightenment. As literacy increased in Europe in the 18th century, the novel spread across the continent and codified the term.

unless you’re speaking French in recent history, no one is in charge of words, and there is no plan.

Absolutely! Prescriptivists are fighting a losing battle, as the Academie is refusing to learn.