Foreclosure

How to spell foreclosure

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce foreclosure

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does foreclosure mean?

1. nounThe legal process by which a lender repossesses a property because the borrower has failed to keep up the mortgage payments.

Foreclosure in a sentence

• The bank began foreclosure proceedings after six missed payments.

• Refinancing the loan helped the family avoid foreclosure on their house.

Where does foreclosure come from?

Language of origin: French

Foreclosure is the noun built from the verb 'foreclose', which English took from Anglo-French forclore and Old French forclos, the past participle meaning 'shut out' or 'excluded'. The first element traces back to the Latin foris, meaning 'outside' or 'out of doors', while the second comes from the Latin claudere, meaning 'to close' or 'to shut'; together the idea was to bar someone from a right by shutting them out. By the 1500s English lawyers were using 'foreclose' for the act of cutting off a borrower's right to redeem a mortgaged property, and the abstract noun 'foreclosure' followed with the standard -ure ending. The spelling trap is that the middle is the familiar word 'close', so the word is really 'fore' plus 'closure', and the silent 'e' carries straight through. Knowing that the second half is simply 'closure' makes the whole word easier to hold together on the page.

How the word is built

• fore- (from Latin foris: outside, shut out)
• clos (from Latin claudere: to close, shut)
• -ure (noun suffix)