Bailout

How to spell bailout

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bailout

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bailout mean?

1. nounAn act of giving financial assistance to rescue a company, bank, or country from collapse.
2. nounAn emergency escape, especially a parachute jump from an aircraft in distress.

Bailout in a sentence

• The government approved a multibillion bailout for the struggling airline.

• The pilot described the bailout from the burning jet as terrifying.

• Critics argued that the bank bailout rewarded reckless lending.

• The manual outlines the bailout procedure for crew if the engine fails.

Where does bailout come from?

Language of origin: French

The compound bailout joins the verb 'bail' with the particle 'out', and the verb itself has a tangled history. One strand of 'bail' comes through Old French 'bailler', meaning to deliver, hand over, or take charge of, which itself goes back to the Latin 'bajulare', to carry or bear a burden; this is the 'bail' of releasing a prisoner on surety, the security handed over to a court. A separate strand, the 'bail' meaning to scoop water out of a boat, comes from Old French 'baille', a bucket, ultimately from a Late Latin word for a water carrier. The phrasal verb 'bail out' drew on the rescuing, water-scooping sense, and by the 1920s American aviators used 'bail out' for leaping from a doomed aircraft with a parachute. The single-word noun 'bailout' for an emergency financial rescue is a mid-twentieth-century American coinage that became globally familiar during banking crises. Because it is simply 'bail' plus 'out', the only real spelling trap is remembering it is now written closed up as one word.

How the word is built

• bail (to release on surety, or to scoop water out)
• out (particle); compounded into a single noun