mortgage

What it means today

1. A loan secured on property, and the paper that records it. Merriam-Webster’s first sense is a conveyance of, or a lien against, property that becomes void when the loan is paid. Its second covers the document, the loan itself and the lender’s interest in the property.5 Wiktionary describes it as an agreement in which a borrower pledges real property as collateral for a loan.3We paid off the mortgage last year.
2. To pledge something against a debt, or to risk the future. As a verb it means to grant property by a mortgage, and, more loosely, to subject something to a claim or obligation. Merriam-Webster marks the second use as usually found in the phrase mortgage the future.5The city has mortgaged the future to pay for the new stadium.

The word has not changed its job much. Johnson’s 1755 dictionary gives “a dead pledge; a thing put into the hands of a creditor”, and a second sense, “the state of being pledged”.7 Webster in 1828 begins with “literally, a dead pledge”, then spends most of the entry on what the law did when the money was or was not paid back, including the “equity of redemption”.8

In sentences

• He will have to take out a mortgage in order to buy the house.5
• Th’ estate runs out, and mortgages are made, / Their fortune ruin’d, and their fame betray’d. John Dryden, quoted under mortgage by Samuel Johnson, 1755.7
• Already a portion of the entire capital of the nation is mortgaged for the support of drunkards. Noah Webster’s example under the verb, 1828.8

Words that sit nearby

mortgagor

The borrower who gives the mortgage. Wiktionary lists it as a derived term.3 Webster’s 1828 entry uses the older spellings mortgager for the borrower and mortgagee for the lender.8

reverse mortgage

A derived term in Wiktionary, and one of the phrases Merriam-Webster lists with mortgage, next to first mortgage, second mortgage and adjustable rate mortgage.35

Welsh mortgage

A derived term in Wiktionary.3 It matters for the origin story below.

mortgage-backed

Listed in Wiktionary, with mortgage-backed security.3

Synonyms and antonyms for mortgage

Synonyms

• For the verb, as in to commitcommit, pledge, troth, vow, engage, plight, promise, contract, affiance, swear, enroll, sign on, enlist, sign up, betroth, overcommit.6 Commit and pledge come first.

Antonyms

The Merriam-Webster thesaurus gives synonyms for the verb only. It has no entry for the noun, so we list none for the loan. For the verb sense it gives one antonym or near antonym:

• For the verb, as in to commitrenege.6

Why is the pledge “dead”?

• This is the answer printed on the page at the top. Littleton, in the English printed beside his Law French, says the feoffee is called a tenant in morgage, “which is as much to say in French, as mortgage, and in Latine mortuum vadium”. He then explains it: it is doubtful whether the borrower will pay on the day. If he does not, the land is taken from him for ever and so “dead to him”. If he does, “the pledge is dead as to the Tenant”.1 Etymonline repeats it with Coke’s words as the quotation.4
• Coke adds that the name also marks a contrast with viuum vadium, the living pledge, which in his Latin gloss (our translation) never dies in any part, because the debt is made up from its yield. His own example is a lender who holds land until he has taken back the sum from its yield. He cites Glanvill for it in the margin.1
• Glanvill’s treatise is more than 400 years older than Coke’s book. Beames’s 1812 translation reads, of a pledge of land: “A pledge is designated by the Term Mortgage when the fruits and Rents, which are received in the interval, in no measure tend to reduce the demand for which the pledge has been given.” A pledge whose rents did reduce the debt was, he says, “just and binding”. The other is “unjust and dishonest”, and is the one called a mortgage.2
• So in the old sense the pledge was dead because it did nothing to pay itself off. Beames notes that this is not the reason Littleton gives, which Coke followed, and thinks Glanvill’s the better fit for the word’s contrast with the living pledge.2 Wiktionary has the same reading: rents and profits kept going to the lender while the pledge lasted, unlike the living pledge, which paid the debt down.3
• Wikipedia’s article on mortgage law goes further. It says the word first meant only the Welsh mortgage, and was later stretched to all pledges and re-explained in the way Coke and Littleton did, which it calls a folk etymology.9 We have only that article’s word for the Welsh part; we did not open a law history ourselves.

A small point that is easy to miss: the French word is mort, “dead”, not “death”. Etymonline traces it to Latin mortuus, the past participle of mori, “to die”.4 Merriam-Webster gives the same Latin.5 Calling it a “death pledge” is a loose translation, not what the French says.

Through time

The two explanations sit more than four centuries apart, and the money side of the word grew a great deal in between. Drag the line and read what people wrote.

How it traveled to England

1. mortuusLatin, “dead”, the past participle of mori, “to die”. From a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to rub away, harm”, and also “to die”.4
2. *wadiFrankish, “wager, pledge”. Wiktionary gives it as the source of the second half.3
3. mort gageOld French, “dead pledge”. Wiktionary suggests it was modeled on a legal Latin mortuum wadium.34
4. mortgage, morgageAnglo-French, then Middle English morgage.53
5. mortgageThe t was put back in spelling later, on the Latin model.4

Stops mark where each language was used, not a single journey. The Frankish step comes from Wiktionary’s etymology and we haven’t checked it in a Germanic dictionary. Modern French dropped the word and now says hypothèque.4

How old is the word?

The two dictionaries we could read disagree on the century, and neither prints the sentence it relies on.

We can’t say why they differ, because neither page names its first example. We have not seen the Middle English Dictionary entry.

The word, measured

Psychologists have asked thousands of people about tens of thousands of words. Here is where mortgage lands in six of those datasets.

Ratings come from panels of roughly 20 to 30 people per word, asked about the word out of context. Percentages are how mortgage ranks among the words in that dataset.

Its relatives and its descendants

mortal

From Latin mors, “death”, the same family as mortuus.4

gage, wage

Etymonline sends the reader from gage to wage, and Wiktionary says to compare both.34

murder

Merriam-Webster’s etymology of mortgage ends with “more at murder”.5

Languages that borrowed it

• mōketeMāori
• morgaisWelsh
• morgaidseScottish Gaelic
• моргейжMongolian

Wiktionary lists these four as borrowings from English.3 Most European languages use a different word for the same loan, from Greek hypothēkē: French hypothèque, German Hypothek, Spanish hipoteca, Italian ipoteca.3 We did not check that Greek source.

Three questions from this page

Where every claim comes from

We read Coke’s 1628 page, Beames’s translation of Glanvill, Johnson, Webster and the data files ourselves, and calculated the numbers on this page from those files. Etymonline and Merriam-Webster block automated readers, so we read their Internet Archive copies. Wikipedia’s account of the Welsh mortgage is marked as such. Checked on 5 November 2026. If something is wrong, write to hello@lexicist.com.

1. Coke, Sir Edward. The first part of the institutes of the lawes of England, or, A commentarie upon Littleton. London, 1628. Lib. 3, cap. 5, sect. 332, fol. 205. The John Adams Library copy at the Boston Public Library, scanned by the Internet Archive. archive.org
2. Glanvill, Ranulf de. A Translation of Glanville, trans. John Beames. London, 1812; reprinted Washington, D.C.: John Byrne, 1900. Book X, chapter VI and Beames’s notes, pp. 204–205; Introduction on the date. Internet Archive. archive.org
3. Wiktionary, “mortgage”, English section. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mortgage
4. Harper, Douglas. “mortgage”. Online Etymology Dictionary. We read the Internet Archive copy; the live site blocks automated access. etymonline.com/word/mortgage
5. Merriam-Webster, “mortgage”. We read the Internet Archive copy of 18 December 2025. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mortgage
6. Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, “mortgage”. Internet Archive copy of 13 January 2026. merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/mortgage
7. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755. johnsonsdictionaryonline.com
8. Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language. 1828. webstersdictionary1828.com
9. Wikipedia, “Mortgage law”, introduction. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_law
10. Brysbaert, M., et al. “Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 51 (2019): 467–479. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9
11. Kuperman, V., et al. “Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words”. Behavior Research Methods 44 (2012): 978–990. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4
12. Brysbaert, M., et al. “Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 46 (2014): 904–911. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5
13. Warriner, A. B., et al. “Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 45 (2013): 1191–1207. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0314-x
14. Lynott, D., et al. “The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms”. Behavior Research Methods 52 (2020): 1271–1291. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z
15. Brysbaert, M., and B. New. “Moving beyond Kučera and Francis”. Behavior Research Methods 41 (2009): 977–990. doi.org/10.3758/BRM.41.4.977
16. Google Books Ngram Viewer, English 2019 corpus, 1700–2022, smoothing 3. Open the chart. Method: Michel, J.-B., et al. Science 331 (2011): 176–182. doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644

Image and audio credits

1628 page: Internet Archive scan of a copy at the Boston Public Library, public domain. Recording: Dvortygirl (US), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Map: Natural Earth, public domain.

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