Mortgage

How to spell mortgage

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mortgage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mortgage mean?

1. nounA loan taken out to buy property or land, with the property itself held as security until the debt is repaid.

Mortgage in a sentence

• They paid off their mortgage last year.

• We're still paying off the mortgage.

• Interest rates affect mortgage payments.

Where does mortgage come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from Old French, where mort meant 'dead' (from the Latin mortuus, 'dead') and gage meant 'a pledge'. So a mortgage was literally a 'dead pledge', a phrase recorded by legal writers as early as the 1300s. The grim logic behind the name is that the deal 'dies' one way or another: either the debt is fully paid and the pledge is dead and void, or the borrower fails to pay and the property is forfeited, so the pledge is dead to the borrower. The silent 't' is the spelling trap, and it is exactly the part of the word that preserves that buried sense of 'death', the same mort- root found in 'mortal', 'mortuary', and 'mortician'. English kept the French spelling even as the pronunciation smoothed the 't' out, which is why fluent adults still drop the letter when writing it from memory.

How the word is built

• mort- (from Latin mortuus: dead)
• gage (Old French: pledge)