mortgage

Etymology

From Middle English morgage,^[1][2] borrowed from Old French mort gage (“dead pledge”) (13th century),^[3][4] from mort “dead” (from Latin mortuus) + gage “pledge”, of Germanic origin.^[1][2] The -t- was restored in Modern English after Latin.^[4]

Seventeenth-century lawyers explained the name, following Coke, as a pledge that becomes “dead” to one side or the other: to the borrower if he fails to pay, to the lender if he pays.^[3][4] Wiktionary gives another explanation: under a mort gage the profits of the land went to the lender without reducing the debt, as opposed to a “living” gage.^[5] Compare gage and wage.^[5][4]

References

1. [1] [2] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
2. [1] [2] Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
3. [1] [2] Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
4. [1] [2] [3] [4] Harper, Douglas, Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
5. [1] [2] Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org