mortgage
n. countablen. a special loan from a bank that you use to buy a house or land. You pay the money back over many years, and the bank can take the property if you stop paying.
n. a legal agreement by which a bank or creditor lends money at interest in exchange for taking title of the debtor's property, with the condition that the conveyance of title becomes void upon the payment of the debt.
They took out a thirty-year mortgage to buy their first home.
Rising interest rates have made it much more expensive for young couples to afford their monthly mortgage payments.
The financial crisis was largely precipitated by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, where high-risk loans were bundled into complex securities and sold to unsuspecting investors.
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).
Commonly used with the verbs 'take out', 'apply for', or 'pay off'.