mortgage

tr.v. mort·gaged, mort·gag·ing, mort·gag·es

[Middle English morgage, from Old French : mort, dead (from Vulgar Latin *mortus, from Latin mortuus, past participle of morī, to die; see mer- in Indo-European roots) + gage, pledge (of Germanic origin).]

Word History: In early Anglo-Norman law, property pledged as security for a loan was normally held by the creditor until the debt was repaid. Under this arrangement, the profits or benefits that accrued to the holder of the property could either be applied to the discharge of the principal or taken by the creditor as a form of interest. In his Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae (1189), Ranulf de Glanville explains that this latter type of pledge, in which the fruits of the property were taken by the creditor without reduction in the debt, was known by the term mort gage, which in Old French means "dead pledge." Because of Christian prohibitions on profiting from money lending, however, the mortgage was considered a species of usury. The preferred type of pledge, in which the property's profits went to paying off the debt and thus continued to benefit the borrower, was known in Old French by the term vif gage, "living pledge." By the time of the great English jurist Thomas Littleton's Treatise on Tenures (1481), however, the mortgage had evolved into its modern form—a conditional pledge in which the property (and its profits) remain in possession of the debtor during the loan's repayment. This led Littleton and his followers, such as the influential jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), to explain the mort in mortgage in terms of the permanent loss of the property in the event the borrower fails to repay, rather than of the loss of the profits from the property over the duration of the loan.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

vb (tr)

[C14: from Old French, literally: dead pledge, from mort dead + gage security, gage¹]

ˈmortgageable adj

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

1. a conveyance of an interest in property as security for the repayment of money borrowed.

2. the deed by which such a transaction is effected.

3. the rights conferred by it, or the state of the property conveyed.

4. to convey or place (property) under a mortgage.

5. to place under advance obligation; pledge.

[1350–1400; Middle English < Old French mortgage=mort dead (< Latin mortuus) + gage gage ¹]

mort′gage•a•ble, adj.

Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

1. the giving of property, usually real property, as security to a creditor for payment of a debt.
2. the deed pledging the security.

-Ologies & -Isms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Collins English Verb Tables © HarperCollins Publishers 2011