mortgage
mort·gage
noun
a conditional conveyance of property as security for the repayment of a loan
verb
put up as security or collateral
Origin
From Middle English morgage and Middle French mortgage, from Anglo-Norman morgage, from Old French mort gage (“dead pledge”), after a translation of judicial Medieval Latin mortuum wadium, with wadium from Frankish *wadi (“wager, pledge”). Compare gage and also wage. So called because rents and profits from the land were owed to the lender for as long as the gage existed (comparable to interest on a loan today), as opposed to the living gage, in which rents and profits automatically reduced the debt (paying it off over time).
Phrases
- anaconda mortgage
- conventional mortgage loan
- dragnet mortgage
- endowment mortgage
- endowment-linked mortgage
- jumbo mortgage
- liar's mortgage
- mortgage-backed security
Related words
Broader terms
Narrower terms
WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.