WORD OF THE DAY: AMORTISE
verb|AM-er-tyze
What It Means
To amortise something, such as a mortgage, is to pay for it by making regular payments over a long period of time.
// If you apply extra payments directly to your loan balance as a principal reduction, your loan can be amortised sooner.
Examples of AMORTISE
“As part of some of the league’s commercial deals—where companies pay the league for rights of some sort—the NFL has received equity or warrants. … The warrants are priced at fair market value on the date of vesting and amortised over 10 years.” — Jacob Feldman and Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico, 5 Aug. 2025
Did You Know?
When you amortise a loan, you figuratively “kill it off” by paying it down in installments, an idea reflected in the etymology of amortise. The word comes ultimately from a Latin word meaning “to kill” that was formed in part from the Latin noun mors, meaning “death”; it is related both to murder and a word naming a kind of loan that is usually amortised: mortgage. The original use of amortise dates to the 14th century, when amortising was about transferring ownership of a property to a corporation, and especially to an ecclesiastical corporation—that is, a corporation consisting wholly of clergy. Such land was said to be in mortmain, which under the feudal system meant that the property was permanently exempt from a lord’s usual payment collections. Mortmain is of course another mors word. Its second syllable comes from Latin manus, meaning “hand,” the implication being that the property was held in the dead hand of a corporation—a hand incapable of paying out.
Merriam Webster Dictionary
