Amortises

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Pays off a loan or debt gradually over time through regular payments
2. Reduces a financial obligation step-by-step by making scheduled repayments
3. Systematically eliminates owed money by spreading payments across a period

Etymology: "Amortises" is the third-person singular form of "amortise", so the history belongs to the verb itself. That verb comes from Old French "amortir", meaning to deaden, extinguish or kill off, which in turn grew from Latin "admortire", "to kill" or "to deaden", built from "ad" plus "mors", "death". The sense of gradually extinguishing a debt by paying it off in instalments is the financial twist: the debt is slowly put to death through regular payments until nothing remains. Under that financial sense, the word once carried a more literal idea of deadening or extinguishing something, and the notion of a debt slowly dying away is what the modern meaning preserves. The verb was taken into English from French, and its legal and accounting use grew out of the earlier sense of making something lapse or die out.

Synonyms: repay, settle, liquidate

Antonyms: incur, accumulate