means The total list of a company's employees and the wages they're owed, or the system that calculates and distributes that pay.

from A plain English compound, joined sometime in the 18th or 19th century from 'pay' and 'roll.' The 'roll' part is the literal one: rolls were once actual scrolls of parchment or paper on which names and accounts were written, the way a 'roll call' still summons names from a list. So 'payroll' began life as exactly what it sounds like — the rolled-up record of who gets paid. 'Pay' itself comes through Old French 'paier' from Latin 'pacare,' to pacify or appease, which carries a quietly cynical truth: paying someone was originally a way of making peace with them.