# debt

Pronunciation: say "DET" /dɛt/

## Noun

1. Money that a person or organization owes and must pay to another, usually arising from a loan or other financial transaction.
   - Simple: Money that you owe to another person or company, usually after borrowing it.
   - _The family struggled for years to clear the debt on their home._
   - _Rising interest rates made the national debt much harder to service._
2. The state or condition of owing something to another person or party.
   - Simple: The situation of owing money or something else to another person.
   - _Years of careless overspending left them in serious debt._
   - _He felt the weight of debt hanging over every choice he made._
3. Something owed to another as a duty: an act to be done for them, an attitude to be held toward them, or a thing to be given.
   - Simple: Something you have a duty to do for another person, feel toward them, or give them.
   - _He repaid his debt to his mentor by guiding younger colleagues for free._
   - _The nation owes a lasting debt to the volunteers who rebuilt the town._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A legal action brought to recover a specific sum of money claimed to be due from another party.

## Origin

Debt comes from Middle English dette, borrowed from Old French dete, from Latin dēbitum ('what is owed, a duty'), from dēbeō ('I owe'), itself a contraction of parts meaning 'to have from.' It is a doublet of debit, and the silent 'b' in the modern spelling was added to match the Latin dēbitum.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/debt (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).