mortgage
Pluralmortgages
Verbmortgages, mortgaging, mortgaged
Pluralmortgages
Formsmortgages, mortgaging, mortgaged
- 1A secured loan, taken for a stated purpose, that lets the lender seize and sell the fixed property used as security if the borrower fails to repay.
Like a safety net the lender keeps: the house itself backs the loan until the very last payment clears.
The bank approved their mortgage after reviewing the couple's income and credit history.
When the borrowers defaulted, the lender moved to foreclose on the mortgage and sell the house.
Note
A lawyer's word with a grim name inside it: Old French mort gage, "dead pledge," a translation of the Medieval Latin mortuum wadium. The property stays registered to the borrower. What the lender holds is only a right of seizure, and that right lapses once the debt is paid, leaving the property unencumbered. Gage and wage share its Frankish root for a pledge. In everyday talk, people get a mortgage, or cannot yet afford one.
- 2To pledge a house or piece of land as security in order to obtain a loan, giving the lender the right to seize it.
The family mortgaged their home to cover the cost of medical treatment.
Rather than sell the land, she chose to mortgage it and invest the proceeds.
Similarpledge
Note
The verb usually runs the other way from the noun. In the home loan, the money buys the property. To mortgage is to put up property you already hold as security for money meant elsewhere: we mortgaged our house in order to start a company. Its object is always the property. You mortgage a house, an estate or a shop, never the loan or the lender. In the present participle, mortgaging drops the final e.
- 3To commit or put at risk something valuable, especially the future, in order to gain an immediate benefit.
Critics warned that the deal would mortgage future generations to pay for today's spending.
By taking on so much debt, the firm mortgaged its long-term stability for short-term gains.
Similarsacrifice, jeopardize, pawn
Note
The metaphor keeps the debt's logic: something is handed over now and must be redeemed later, or lost. Its favorite objects are the largest things a person has. Verne Moberg writes of a woman who mortgaged her future, and Antony Rowland of a latter-day Faustus who mortgaged his soul to his art. A following for or to names what the pledge was made for.
Less common meaning
- 4The condition of being pledged; the state in which property is held as security for a debt.
Note
An older use in which the word named a condition rather than a contract. Property was in mortgage, as in lands given in mortgage, much as goods are in pawn. The construction now appears only in old documents and historical writing. Modern English says the land is mortgaged, or that there is a mortgage on it. Without an article, in mortgage points to the pledged state, not to the loan itself.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
This comes from Middle English "morgage" and Middle French "mortgage," from Anglo-Norman "morgage," ultimately from Old French "mort gage" ("dead pledge"). It translated the Medieval Latin legal term "mortuum wadium," with "wadium" from Frankish *wadi ("wager, pledge"). It was called a "dead pledge" because the lender kept the rents and profits from the land for as long as the pledge lasted, unlike a "living gage," where those profits reduced the debt over time.