mortgage

• morgage (obsolete)

From Middle English morgage and Middle French mortgage, from Anglo-Norman morgage, from Old French mort gage (“dead pledge”), after a translation of judicial Medieval Latin mortuum wadium, with wadium from Frankish *wadi (“wager, pledge”). Compare gage and also wage. So called because rents and profits from the land were owed to the lender for as long as the gage existed (comparable to interest on a loan today), as opposed to the living gage, in which rents and profits automatically reduced the debt (paying it off over time).

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈmɔː.ɡɪd͡ʒ/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈmɔɹ.ɡɪd͡ʒ/, /ˈmɔɹ.ɡəd͡ʒ/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)ɡɪd͡ʒ
• Hyphenation: mort‧gage

mortgage (countable and uncountable, plural mortgages)

1. (law, real estate) A legal agreement in which a borrower pledges real property as collateral for a loan used to purchase or refinance that property.
   • 1815, Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, Or, The Astrologer, Volume 1, page 19:

     The appriser, therefore, (as the holder of a mortgage was then called,) entered upon possession, and in the language of Hotspur, "came me cranking in," and cut the family out of another monstrous cantle of their remaining property.

2. (obsolete) The state of being pledged.

   lands given in mortgage

• → Māori: mōkete
• → Mongolian: моргейж (morgejž)
• → Scottish Gaelic: morgaidse
• → Welsh: morgais

mortgage (third-person singular simple present mortgages, present participle mortgaging, simple past and past participle mortgaged)

1. (transitive, law) To borrow against a property, to obtain a loan for another purpose by giving away the right of seizure to the lender over a fixed property such as a house or piece of land; to pledge a property in order to get a loan.

   to mortgage a property, an estate, or a shop

   We mortgaged our house in order to start a company.

2. (transitive, figurative) To pledge and make liable; to make subject to obligation; to achieve an immediate result by paying for it in the long term.
   • 1982, Verne Moberg, The Truth and Work of Victoria Benedictsson, page 72:

     She mortgaged her future for the pleasures of the relationship with the sculptor, a relationship she knew would be short.

   • 2001, Antony Rowland, Tony Harrison and the Holocaust, page 193:

     Like a latter-day Faustus who has mortgaged his soul to the pursuit of his art, Harrison now desperately craves the paternal love from which his learning has estranged him.

• mortgagee
• mortgager