Other forms: assets
An asset is something valuable that a person or a company owns: a building, a van, a patent, money in the bank. On a balance sheet the assets sit on one side and the debts on the other.
The word stretches easily to people and qualities, so she is an asset to the team and patience is his greatest asset. In intelligence work an asset is a person recruited to supply information, which is why spy novels use the word so flatly and so coldly. Asset-stripping is buying a company in order to sell off its valuable parts. Finance talks in the plural, assets, and reaches for the singular only when it means one particular thing. The opposite in every sense is a liability, which does the same double duty: a debt, or the person who keeps causing trouble.
1nounassetSomething valuable that a person or organisation owns.
“The company sold its overseas assets to pay the fine.”
2nounadvantageA person or quality that is useful and worth having.
“Her calm is an asset in a crisis.”
3nounrecruitedA person recruited to supply secret information to an intelligence service.
“The agency lost its best asset in the city.”
asset is a thing of value.
Also accepted in games: assets
Asset was made by cutting the s off assets, which is the reverse of the usual road between singular and plural. Assets came from Anglo-Norman asetz and Old French assez, meaning 'enough'. So the idea buried inside asset is not riches at all, but having enough.
Old French
assez — enough
Anglo-Norman
asetz
English, today
asset
Back-formation from assets. a back-formation from assets, from Anglo-Norman asetz, from Old French assez (“enough”). Compare Middle English asseth.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA