insurer

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a person or organization that provides insurance and undertakes to pay for specified losses in return for premiums

   The insurer paid the full cost of repairing the storm-damaged roof.

Formed from insure + the agent suffix -er. Insure arose as a variant of ensure, which came through Anglo-French from a word meaning 'to make safe or secure'; by the seventeenth century, insure had specialized in the financial sense of guaranteeing against loss.

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