Insurance

How to spell insurance

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce insurance

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does insurance mean?

1. nounAn arrangement in which a company guarantees compensation for specified loss, damage, or injury in return for regular payments.
2. nounA measure taken to protect against a possible bad outcome.

Insurance in a sentence

• The garage repaired the car once the insurance claim was approved.

• Keeping a second copy of the file was simply good insurance against a crash.

• Travel insurance covered the cost of her cancelled flight.

• A strong reference acts as insurance when you apply for a competitive job.

Where does insurance come from?

Language of origin: French

The word grew out of the verb 'insure', which began as a spelling variant of 'ensure'. Both trace back through Old French enseurer to the prefix en- 'make' combined with seur 'sure', and seur itself descends from the Latin securus, literally 'free from care', built from se- 'without' and cura 'care'. In the late 1400s and 1500s English used 'insure' and 'ensure' almost interchangeably for 'to make certain', but over time the two split: 'ensure' kept the general sense of guaranteeing, while 'insure' specialised into the financial sense of guaranteeing against loss for a payment. By the 1600s 'insurance' had settled as the noun for that financial protection, especially in shipping and trade. The spelling trap is the unstressed -ance ending, which sounds identical to -ence, and the buried 'sur' that echoes the word 'sure'.

How the word is built

• in- (variant of en-: make, put into)
• sur (sure, from Latin securus: free from care)
• -ance (noun suffix: state or action)