Amortize (Verb)
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Pronunciation: [’æ-mor-tIz]

Definition 1: (1) To pay off a debt such as a mortgage by installment payments; (2) to deduct the cost of business equipment or other permanent investment from company taxes over a series of taxable periods.

Usage 1: Today’s word is a financial term used in reference to loans and taxes. The noun is "amortization" and the passive adjective is "amortizable," as an amortizable expense. In the UK, of course, these words are also spelt "amortise," "amortisation," and "amortisable." (For more financial terms, get Barron’s financial dictionary for your Palm OS device in the YD Word Shop.

Suggested usage: Businesses can deduct all their business investments from the income they must pay taxes on. However, the cost of an investment in machinery or buildings may be reduced by partial deductions over several tax periods: "We are amortizing the cost of our new plant over 10 years." Reducing a debt by regular payments is also amortization: "Garfield, I would loan you $20 but you will have to at least amortize what you already owe me first."

Etymology: From Old French amortir, amortiss- "to bring to death" from Vulgar Latin *admortire "to deaden" based on ad- "(up)to" + Latin mors, mort- "death." The Latin stem clearly underlies the English words "mortal," "mortuary," "mortify," and "moribund." However, we also find "morbid" which comes from Latin morbus "disease," a frequent cause of death, and "morsel" from Latin mordere "to bite," a much earlier way of ending life. The same Proto-Indo-European root (*mer-/*mor-) came directly through Old Germanic to English as "murder." In Russian the root is mer-, found in umeret’ "to die" and smert’ "death," one of the blended stems in the name of the war-time Soviet counterintelligence agency, Smersh (from smert’ shpionam "death to spies").

—Dr. Language, yourDictionary.com

"to bring to death"

Please, don’t remind me.  I am amortizing enough as it is.

Sitran

I am amortizing enough as it is

I feel your pain, Sitran. It’s almost a race with time. Who’s going to go into the shredder first? You or your mortgage?  :)

- PW

If amortize is related to murder, so must mortgage.  So from where does gage come - gagging?
PS
Hoping that murderous amortizing of the mortgage does not murder you.
PPS
Who said: "Banks are willing to lend you umbrellas when the sun is shining, but want them back when it is raining."?

The quote is of Robert Frost.

And the American Heritage/YDC Etymology of Mortgage:

Word History: The great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who lived from 1552 to 1634, has explained why the term mortgage comes from the Old French words mort, "dead," and gage, "pledge." It seemed to him that it had to do with the doubtfulness of whether or not the mortgagor will pay the debt. If the mortgagor does not, then the land pledged to the mortgagee as security for the debt "is taken from him for ever, and so dead to him upon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the [mortgagee]." This etymology, as understood by 17th-century attorneys, of the Old French term morgage, which we adopted, may well be correct. The term has been in English much longer than the 17th century, being first recorded in Middle English with the form morgage and the figurative sense "pledge" in a work written before 1393.

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In your imagination, who died first, the mortgage or the man?

       - §

Thanks "paragraph" for sorting this out. However, I can’t but observe that the expression today might rather be moregage, since the closer you get to paying off your house, the more you appear to owe.

- PW
who hates usery with a passion

Amortize

- To pay off a debt such as a mortgage by installment payments;
- To deduct the cost of business equipment or other permanent investment from company taxes over a series of taxable periods.

Dossier de surendettement

Such unadulterated ‘cover up’.  Putting a word in, just to advertise.  We don’t appreciate it, nor do we appreciate you.  Did you pay for the advertisement?