Forecloses

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To legally reclaim property from a borrower who has defaulted on loan payments and terminate their ownership rights
2. To take back ownership of a property from an individual who has failed to meet mortgage obligations, ending their rights to it
3. To officially seize property when the borrower does not keep up with loan repayments

Etymology: "Forecloses" is the third-person singular form of "foreclose", so the verb itself is simply the present tense of its root. The root has two strands that meet in English. One comes from Old French "forclore", meaning "to exclude", built from "for-", a prefix signalling error or exclusion, and "clore", "to shut". The other is native: Old English "forclȳsan" meant "to close up", from "fore-" and "close". Middle English speakers merged the two, so a legal sense of shutting someone out of a right came to sit alongside the older physical sense of closing something up. That legal sense is the one that matters for mortgages. To foreclose is to shut the borrower out of the property, ending their right to redeem it after default. The idea of exclusion from a right, present in the French prefix and the English "close", is what the modern financial meaning preserves.

Synonyms: repossession, seizure