Mortgage Literally Means 'Death Pledge' in Old French

Next time you're signing mortgage papers, consider this: you're entering a "death pledge." That's the literal translation of the word "mortgage," which comes from the Old French legal term mort gage—"mort" meaning dead, and "gage" meaning pledge or promise.

Before you panic, the morbid name isn't quite as sinister as it sounds. It's actually a clever description of how medieval property law worked.

The Deal That Dies

The "death" in death pledge refers to the agreement itself, not the borrower. In medieval law, a mortgage was called "dead" because the deal would end one of two ways: either you paid off the debt (killing the obligation), or you failed to pay (and the land died to you—meaning you lost it forever).

Sir Edward Coke, the famous 17th-century English jurist, explained it this way in 1664: the land is "dead to him upon condition" if the borrower can't pay. The uncertainty of whether payment would happen made the pledge fundamentally different from other property arrangements.

A Legal Innovation

Medieval lawyers distinguished mortgages from "living pledges" (vif gage), where the lender could use the land's income to pay down the debt. With a mortgage, the land generated no benefit for either party until the terms were met—it was economically "dead" during the loan period.

The term entered English from Anglo-Norman French in the late 14th century, appearing in legal documents as mortuum wadium in Medieval Latin. It was technical legal jargon that eventually became the common term we use today for home loans.

From Death to Housekeeping

Today, we've sanitized the concept considerably. "Mortgage" sounds professional and financial, not existentially threatening. Interestingly, the French themselves abandoned the term—modern French uses hypothèque instead, which lacks the dramatic flair of a death pledge.

But the dark poetry remains embedded in English. Every monthly payment you make is slowly killing that pledge, bringing you closer to the day when the death is complete and the property is fully yours. In a strange way, it's one of the few deaths worth celebrating.