mortgage

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A loan you take from a bank to buy a house or land, which the bank can take back if you fail to repay.

   They took out a thirty-year mortgage to buy their first home.

2. 2
   verb

   To borrow money using your house or land as a guarantee that you will repay it.

   They mortgaged their house to start a new business.

3. 3
   verb

   To risk something important in the future in order to get a benefit now.

   By taking on so much debt, the country is mortgaging its future.

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).

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