It's Merriam Webster's Word of the Day podcast for January 1st.

Today's word is amortize, also pronounced amortize, and spelled A-M-O-R-T-I-Z-E.

To amortize something such as a mortgage is to pay for it by making regular

payments over a long period of time. Here's the word used, and a sentence from Sportico, as part of

some of the league's commercial deals, where companies pay the league for rights of some sort,

the NFL has received equity or warrants.

The warrants are priced at fair market value on the date of vesting and amortized over 10 years.

When you amortize alone, you figuratively kill it off by paying it down in installments,

an idea reflected in the etymology of

the word amortize. It comes ultimately from a Latin word meaning to kill that was formed in part

from the Latin noun Morse, meaning death. It's related both to murder and a word naming a kind of loan

that is usually amortized, a mortgage.

The original use of amortized dates to the 14th century when amortizing was about transferring

ownership of a property to a corporation, and especially to an ecclesiastical corporation,

that is a corporation consisting wholly of clergy.

Such land was said to be in Mortmain, which under the feudal system meant that the property

was permanently exempt from a lord's usual payment collections. Mortmain is, of course, another Morse word.

Its second syllable comes from the Latin word manus, meaning hand,

the implication being that the property was held in the dead hand of a corporation,

a hand incapable of paying out.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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