Warranty

How to spell warranty

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce warranty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does warranty mean?

1. nounA written guarantee from a maker or seller promising to repair or replace a product within a set period.

Warranty in a sentence

• The laptop came with a two-year warranty covering parts and labour.

• The repair was free because the fault occurred while the warranty was still valid.

Where does warranty come from?

Language of origin: French

Warranty entered English through Anglo-Norman French, the dialect of French spoken in England after the Norman Conquest. It derives from warantie, meaning a 'protection' or 'guarantee', which was built on the noun warant, a guarantor or defender. That word traces back to a Germanic root meaning 'to watch over, protect, or guard', the same source that gave us the verb 'warn' and the noun 'ward'. Interestingly, the standard French form of the same root began with a 'g' rather than a 'w', which is exactly how we ended up with the near-twin 'guarantee'; warranty and guarantee are essentially the same word arriving by two different doors. By the late Middle Ages warranty had settled into its legal sense of a formal promise that something is as represented, and the doubled 'r' (carried over from the French spelling) is the small trap that catches writers today.

How the word is built

• warrant (a guarantee, from Old French warant: protector)
• -y (noun suffix forming an abstract noun)