What’s in a (Financial) Name? Popular Financial Terms and Their Interesting Origins
By: Lucy Zemljic on October 6, 2014
1. Mortgage
The first term on this list is also the one I’ve most often found myself contemplating. How exactly did the word “mortgage” come about, and what’s with that strange pronunciation? As it turns out, the origin of this financial term clears up those questions.
The word “mortgage” comes from the Old French gage (pledge) and mort (dead), which comes from the Latin mortuus which also means “dead.”
This word first showed up in the late 14th century, but didn’t exactly mean what it does today. The first record of the word in English was in John Gower’s long poem Confessio Amantis, “The Lover's Confession,” written between 1386 and 1390. Take a look at the excerpt below:
“In mariage His trouthe plight lith in morgage, Which if he breke, it is falshode.”
2. Amortization
The word amortization comes from the Old French amortiss, which hails from the word amortir, meaning “to bring to death.”
(Another financial term referring to death? I’m sensing a pattern here....)
Going further back, the French term comes from the Medieval Latin amortizationem, which itself goes back to the Latin admortire, meaning “to extinguish.” This word is made up of the suffix ad- (meaning “to”) and the word mortus, meaning “dead”.
In the 1670s, the word “amortization” was used in reference to lands given to religious orders, but the financial meaning – the extinction of a debt – first sprung up in 1824. The word now shows up most commonly in reference to paying off a mortgage, an “amortization period” being the amount of time it takes to pay off a loan.
3. Broker
The word “broker” has some colourful origins, and again comes to us from the Language of Love.
This term first made its way into the English language in the late 14th century, hailing from the Anglo-French word brocour, meaning “small trader.” Brocour, in turn, came from the Old French brochier meaning “to broach or tap (a keg.)”
The verb brochier meant “keg tapping,” and the brokour/broker was a “tapster” who sold wine from the tap. By extension, the word came to refer to any kind of retail dealer, a person who bought something to sell it over again or who bought something for another person, like a middleman or agent.
In Middle English, the word was used contemptuously to describe peddlers and other unsavoury characters, but the mortgage meaning – which came about in the 1800s – has none of that shady vibe!
4. Parity
If you watch the news or read the business section of the paper, you’re bound to come across phrases like “the Loonie reaches U.S. dollar parity” or “can the dollar hit parity this year?”
“Parity” first showed up in English literature in the year 1572, and comes from the Middle French parité, meaning “equality between two beings or objects of the same nature.” If we go even further back in word history, we see it comes from the Latin paritas meaning simply “equality.”
The first instance of the word “parity” with the financial meaning most attributed to it today only showed up in the year 1945.
5. Debt
Like so many English words, “debt” doesn’t exactly sound like it looks. It sounds like it should be spelled “det,” but it has that silent letter, doesn't it?
As it turns out, that silent letter made its way into the modern English word “debt” because of its ancestral Latin origins. The word “debt” first showed up in the late 13th century, and comes from the Old French dete/dette, which itself comes from the Latin debitum, the past participle of debere which means “to owe.”
In Middle English, the word was spelled “det” or “dette”, but after the 16th century it took on the spelling debte. This is where the modern spelling of “debt” originates – and that’s where that pesky silent b comes from.
After the Hundred Years War, English took over as the language of power, but kept all those fancy French-origin words that would someday shape the glossary of financial terms as we know it.
