Other forms: deposits, deposited, depositing
A deposit is money you hand over first, to hold something or to prove you will come back for the rest. Two months' rent before you get the keys, twenty pounds down on a bike, the coin you feed into the trolley and get back at the end.
Watch the rent one, because learners lose money over it: a deposit is not the rent itself, it is held against damage and comes back to you when you leave the flat as you found it. As a verb it is what you do at a bank — you deposit your wages and the money sits there. Geologists use the same word for anything that has settled and stayed: a deposit of coal, a deposit of silt at the mouth of a river, the white deposit in the bottom of the kettle. All of them are things put down and left.
1nounrentMoney paid up front and held until you pay the rest or bring the thing back.~11%
“We paid a deposit of two months' rent.”
synonyms: down payment
2verbdepositTo put money into a bank account.~45%
“She deposited the cheque on Monday morning.”
synonyms: pay in
3nounrockA layer of material that has settled in one place and stayed.~18%
“The valley holds one of the largest coal deposits in the country.”
synonyms: sediment
4verbleaveTo put something down and leave it there.~26%
“The river deposits mud on the fields every spring.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 182 sentences found in the wild and placed 177 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
de-POS-it → a POCKET
Picture a pocket held upside down over the bank counter. Money runs out of it and will not stop — the drawer fills, then the floor, and the pocket still has more.
hooks ontopocket
Latin depōnō meant put down, and depositus was the thing put down. That is still the whole word. The money you set down at the bank, the mud a river sets down on a field, and the depot where goods are set down and left are the same idea three times over — depot and deposit are the same Latin word, arriving by different roads.
Proto-Indo-European
*tḱey-
Latin
depositus
English, today
deposit
Built from
Learned borrowing from Latin depositus. Latin depositus, past participle of depono (“put down”). a doublet of depot.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA