Installment

How to spell installment

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce installment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does installment mean?

1. nounOne of a series of payments made at fixed intervals to settle a debt or price over time.
2. nounA single part of something published, broadcast, or released in stages.

Installment in a sentence

• The final installment on the car loan is due next month.

• The next installment of the documentary airs on Sunday.

• Each installment covers both the interest and a slice of the balance.

• Readers waited a month for the latest installment of the serial.

Where does installment come from?

Language of origin: French

The word ties two strands together. The base verb 'install' came into English in the late 1300s from medieval Latin installare, built from in- meaning 'in' and stallum meaning a 'stall' or 'seat', so to install someone literally meant to place them in their official seat. The financial sense, a payment made at a fixed time, actually grew out of a separate Anglo-French word estaler, meaning 'to fix' or 'to arrange in stages', which gave an older English form 'estalment'. By the 1700s that arrangement-of-staged-payments word had been reshaped to match the more familiar 'install', producing 'installment' with its doubled L. The single root idea of fixing something in place runs through both the seating sense and the scheduled-payment sense. The spelling trap, the double L plus the unstressed -ment, is a direct legacy of the word being welded onto 'install'.

How the word is built

• in- (in, into)
• stall (place, fix, from Old French estal: position)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)

British and American spelling

Installment is the American spelling. British English spells it instalment.