Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
nounA legal agreement in which a borrower pledges real property as collateral for a loan used to purchase or refinance that property.
nounThe state of being pledged.
Sentence Examples
The bank holds a mortgage on his building.
I suffered from my mortgage loan.
The young couple applied for a mortgage to buy their house.
CEFR Practice Quiz
To buy the house, they took out a ____ from the bank that they would pay back over 30 years.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
They had to take out a twenty-year ____ from the local bank so that they could afford to buy their very first family home.
Word Origin & History
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).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"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."
— 1815, Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, Or, The Astrologer, Volume 1, page 19:
"She mortgaged her future for the pleasures of the relationship with the sculptor, a relationship she knew would be short."
— 1982, Verne Moberg, The Truth and Work of Victoria Benedictsson, page 72:
"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."
— 2001, Antony Rowland, Tony Harrison and the Holocaust, page 193: