Reimbursement

How to spell reimbursement

13 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce reimbursement

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reimbursement mean?

1. nounRepayment of money that someone has spent or lost, typically expenses paid on another party's behalf.

Reimbursement in a sentence

• The company offers full reimbursement for travel costs incurred on business trips.

• She submitted the receipts and waited three weeks for reimbursement of her hotel bill.

Where does reimbursement come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin bursa, meaning a 'purse' or 'leather bag', which in turn came from the Greek byrsa, meaning 'hide' or 'skin' (the material such bags were made from). From bursa English inherited a small family of money words, including 'purse', 'bursar' (the officer who holds a college's money bag), and 'disburse' (to pay money out). The verb 'reimburse' was assembled in the early 1600s from the prefix re- 'back' and an older verb 'imburse' meaning 'to put into a purse', so the whole thing literally meant 'to put money back into someone's purse'. The noun 'reimbursement', the act of paying someone back, followed shortly after. Knowing that hidden 'burse' (purse) sits in the middle helps explain the spelling: it is re + im + burse + ment, not a stray '-burst' or '-bursh', and the silent run of consonants makes more sense once you picture the purse at its heart.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• im- (in, into)
• burse (purse, money bag, from Latin bursa)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)