Other forms: insurances
Insurance is the arrangement where you pay a company regularly and they pay out if disaster strikes. Spreading one person's catastrophe across thousands of people's payments.
The vocabulary is fixed and worth knowing: the premium is what you pay, the policy is the contract, the excess is the first part of any claim you cover yourself, and a claim is what you make when something goes wrong. Types are named for what they cover — car, home, travel, life. Figuratively, insurance means any precaution taken against a possible loss.
1nouninsuranceAn arrangement in which a company pays for specified losses in return for regular payments.~98%
“The insurance did not cover flood damage.”
2nounanythingAnything done as a precaution against loss.~2%
“He kept a spare key as insurance.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Anglo-Norman
enseurer
Middle English
ensuren
English
insure
English, today
insurance
Built from
From the older form ensurance, see also assurance. by surface analysis, en + insure + -ance. insure c, as a variant of Middle English ensuren (from Anglo-Norman enseurer, itself from Old French - en- + seür, probably influenced by asseürer (“to assure”)); took on its particular sense of "make safe against loss by payment of premiums" in 1635, replacing assure. a doublet of ensure.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA