amortize

What it means

1. transitivebusinessTo alienate (property) in mortmain.
2. transitivebusinessTo wipe out (a debt, liability etc.) gradually or in installments.

   extraordinary borrowing had been so extensive, Joly de Fleury reckoned, that even if it were amortized over the following decade, the state would still be running an annual deficit of over 50 million livres.

   2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 318

   1 more example

   "Be reasonable," she pleads. "He's built a business. He could give a math unit on earnings versus expenses, or how to amortize a loan. He could let us tour his repair shop and maybe teach us about basic auto mechanics."

   2019, Gordon Korman, The Unteachables, page 141

3. broadlytransitiveTo make a large cost or other quantity more manageable by dividing it into smaller parts (such as over a long time or across many transactions).

   The magnitude of the frequency adjustment is a compromise between time accuracy, which would favor a large frequency offset so as to amortize the time error over the smallest possible interval

   2021 January 13, Y. Jade Morton, Frank van Diggelen, James J. Spilker, Jr., Bradford W. Parkinson, Sherman Lo, Grace Gao, Position, Navigation, and Timing Technologies in the 21st Century: Integrated Satellite Navigation, Sensor Systems, and Civil Applications, Volume 1, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 847

In a sentence

extraordinary borrowing had been so extensive, Joly de Fleury reckoned, that even if it were amortized over the following decade, the state would still be running an annual deficit of over 50 million livres.

2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 318

Where it comes from

1. Latinmortuus“dead”
2. Vulgar Latin*admortīre
3. Old Frenchamortir
4. Middle Englishamortisen
5. Englishamortize

From Middle English amortisen, from Old French amortir (via the stem amortiss-), from Vulgar Latin *admortīre, derived from Latin mortuus (“dead”).