Other forms: mortgages
A mortgage is the huge bank loan people spend decades paying back in order to own a house. The house itself is the security.
If the payments stop, the lender can take the property, which is what makes it a mortgage rather than an ordinary loan. The vocabulary is fixed: a deposit up front, a term of twenty-five years or so, a fixed or variable rate, and repayments every month. The t is silent. The word comes from French for a dead pledge, on the grounds that the deal dies when the debt is paid.
1nounmortgageA long-term loan secured against a property.
“They still have twelve years left on the mortgage.”
Proto-Indo-European
*mer-
Frankish
*wadi — wager, pledge
Medieval Latin
mortuum wadium
Old French
mort gage — dead pledge
Anglo-Norman
morgage
Middle French
mortgage
Middle English
morgage
English, today
mortgage
From Middle English morgage and Middle French mortgage, from Anglo-Norman morgage, from Old French mort gage (“dead pledge”), after a translation of judicial Medieval Latin mortuum wadium, with wadium from Frankish wadi (“wager, pledge”). Compare gage and also wage. So called because rents and profits from the land were owed to the lender for as long as the gage existed (comparable to interest on a loan today), as opposed to the living gage, in which rents and profits automatically reduced the debt (paying it off over time).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA