Waivers

How to spell waivers

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce waivers

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does waivers mean?

1. nounDocuments or formal acts by which a person voluntarily gives up a legal right or claim.

Waivers in a sentence

• Every parent had to sign liability waivers before the children boarded the rafts.

• The gym requires new members to complete injury waivers at the front desk.

Where does waivers come from?

Language of origin: French

This word descends from the Anglo-French legal verb weyver, meaning to abandon or give up a claim, which itself goes back to an Old North French form related to waif, an unclaimed or stray piece of property. In the language of medieval English courts, lawyers often turned a French verb into a noun simply by keeping its infinitive ending, which is why so many legal terms end in -er: think of disclaimer, misnomer, merger, and remainder. By the same route the act of voluntarily surrendering a right became a waiver, and the document that records that surrender took the same name. The verb waive entered English in the 1300s and the noun waiver followed by the 1500s, always tied to the idea of letting something go rather than holding on to it. The spelling trap is real: waivers (giving up rights) sounds identical to wavers (hesitates or moves to and fro), yet the two come from completely different roots, so the legal sense keeps the i it inherited from waive.

How the word is built

• waive (to give up a right)
• -er (Anglo-Norman noun-from-verb suffix)
• -s (plural)