Credit

How to spell credit

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce credit

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does credit mean?

1. nounAn arrangement allowing goods or money to be obtained now and paid for later, or the trust that makes this possible.
2. nounPublic acknowledgement or praise given to someone for an achievement.
3. nounA unit of study counted towards a qualification or degree.
4. verbTo attribute something to a person or cause, or to add an amount to an account.

Credit in a sentence

• noun

  The shop let her buy the sofa on credit and pay in monthly instalments.

• noun

  The engineer deserves full credit for solving the design flaw.

• noun

  The evening course earns one credit towards her diploma.

• verb

  The bank will credit your account once the refund clears.

• noun

  A strong repayment history improves your credit rating with the bank.

• noun

  She took the credit for a project the whole team had built.

Where does credit come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb credere, meaning 'to believe' or 'to trust', and more specifically to its past participle creditum, 'a thing entrusted or lent'. The financial sense grew directly from the idea of trust: to give someone credit was originally to trust that they would repay, so the abstract notion of belief and the concrete notion of a loan were bound together from the start. English took the word in the sixteenth century, partly through Italian credito (a key term in early banking and bookkeeping) and partly through French crédit. The same Latin root sits inside a whole family of relatives such as 'credible', 'creed', and 'incredible', all of which still carry the underlying flavour of believing. Knowing that the core is cred, 'to believe', helps fix the single d and the -it ending, since the word is simply cred plus it, with no doubling.

How the word is built

• cred (Latin credere: to believe, trust)
• -it (from past participle creditum: a thing entrusted)