It is a small comfort, when paying a mortgage, to know that the very word for the contract acknowledges its grim nature. "Mortgage" comes from Old French mort gage, literally "death pledge" — from mort ("dead") and gage ("pledge, security").
Why Death?
The 13th-century English jurist Sir Edward Coke explained the term this way: a mortgage is so called because of the conditional nature of the pledge. Either the debt is paid and the pledge dies (no longer obligates the borrower) or the debt is not paid and the property dies (is lost to the lender). Either way, something dies. It is a small piece of legal grim humour from the medieval common law.
Mort and Gage
Both halves of the word are productive across English:
- Mort- — from Latin mors/mortis ("death"). It surfaces in mortal, mortify, mortuary, immortal, and the dueller's phrase "mortal combat."
- Gage — an Old French and Middle English word for a pledge or token of intent. A medieval knight throwing down his glove was throwing down a gage — a challenge backed by his own honour. The word survives in engage (to enter a pledge) and in the older "to take up the gage."
Common Law to Common Speech
"Mortgage" entered English directly from Norman French legal vocabulary in the 14th century. For most of its history it was a technical term used only in property law. Modern home-ownership made it an everyday word: by the 20th century, "the mortgage" was something most middle-class English speakers would expect to spend much of their working life paying. The death-pledge has become household furniture.