Moratorium

How to spell moratorium

10 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce moratorium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does moratorium mean?

1. nounAn official, temporary ban on or suspension of a particular activity.

Moratorium in a sentence

• The council imposed a moratorium on new housing developments while it reviewed the flood risk.

• The bank agreed to a six-month moratorium on loan repayments for struggling customers.

Where does moratorium come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin moratorium, the neuter form of the adjective moratorius, meaning 'tending to delay'. That adjective was built on the verb morari, 'to delay or linger', which in turn came from the noun mora, meaning 'a delay' or 'a pause'. In Roman and later legal Latin a moratorium was specifically an authorised period during which a debtor was permitted to put off payment, and English borrowed the word in this financial sense during the second half of the 1800s. From there the meaning broadened to cover any official, temporary halt on an activity, such as a freeze on building, testing, or executions. The same mora root sits quietly inside the rarer English word 'demur', to raise an objection and so hold things up, and remembering that the word is fundamentally about delay can help fix the single 'r' and the Latin '-orium' ending in the mind.

How the word is built

• morator- (delayer, from morari: to delay)
• -ium (noun suffix denoting a place or condition)