Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

demurrage

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — demur sits at #15,001Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Demurrage is a charge for keeping a container or ship too long. Pay demurrage, demurrage charges, avoid demurrage.

It runs by the day and mounts fast, which is why customs delays cost importers far more than the delay itself. The word is from the same root as demur and means a charge for tarrying.

Definitions of demurrage

  1. 1noundemurrageA charge for keeping a container or ship too long.C2

    “The importer had to pay demurrage because the container sat at the port for three weeks.”

demurrage is a charge.

Where it comes from

Old French demorage comes from demorer, to tarry, from Latin demorari; demur is a relative.

  1. Latin

    demoror — to tarry

  2. Old French

    demorage

  3. English, today

    demurrage

1640s, from Old French demorage, from demorer (English demur), from Latin demoror (“to tarry”). by surface analysis, demur + -age, with doubled ‘r’ to clarify pronunciation and avoid ambiguity with demure.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Shipping & Logistics

Practise this word

demurrage in the wild

  • If the value of the currency relative to gold has increased, the person receives more than one ounce of gold and demurrage occurred; seigniorage did not occur.

    Seigniorage

  • Officially, demurrage is a form of liquidated damages for breaching the laytime as it is stated in the governing contract (the charterparty).

    Demurrage

  • The demurrage sometimes causes a loss to the seller as it increases cost of the total freight.

    Demurrage

  • Between 2003 and 2015, the demurrage rate was 2% per quarter, or 8% per year.

    Chiemgauer

  • As of 2021, the demurrage rate is 3% every six months, or 6% per year for the paper money form.

    Chiemgauer

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • demur