Which word was invented first, 'mortgage' or 'morgue'?
Executive summary
The evidence in available sources shows "mortgage" entered English via Old/Middle French and medieval Latin in the late 14th century; "morgue" is a much later borrowing from French, coming into English in the late 18th/19th century. Sources date mortgage to the late 1300s (mort gage / mortuum vadium) and trace morgue to an 1800s Paris institution called La Morgue [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Origins at a glance: a medieval financial term vs. a modern institutional name
"Mortgage" derives from Old French mort gage, literally "dead pledge," and was recorded as entering English from medieval Latin mortuum vadium around the late 14th century (late 1300s) [1] [5]. By contrast, "morgue" is a borrowing from the French morgue that referred to a specific establishment in Paris used to display unidentified bodies in the 1800s; English adoption dates to the late eighteenth or nineteenth century [2] [4] [3].
2. Why mortgage is older: legal history and linguistic paths
Etymologies show mortgage traveled through legal Latin and Anglo‑Norman channels as part of medieval property law: Old French mort gage → Anglo‑Norman/Medieval Latin mortuum vadium → Middle English morgage/mortgage, with early English uses noted from the 14th century [5] [6]. Multiple consumer‑facing explainers and etymology pieces reiterate that mortgage's meaning and form have roots in medieval legal practice [7] [8].
3. Why morgue is newer: a Parisian house name becomes a common noun
Morgue did not arise from the same medieval legal or Latin roots. Etymological accounts link it to La Morgue, an institution in Paris that became a lexical source in modern French, and thereafter entered English as the term for a mortuary or place where bodies are kept, with the English borrowing occurring in the 18th–19th century timeframe [2] [4] [3]. Vocabulary and etymology summaries explicitly tie the English word to that Parisian establishment [9] [2].
4. How spelling and form changed over time: same root, different trajectories
Mortgage shows internal orthographic shifts: early English used morgage, and the appeared in the mid‑16th century by analogy with Latin forms, becoming the modern spelling mortgage [6]. Morgue, on the other hand, entered English already as a French loanword and retained its form tied to the Paris institution; its semantic development focused on mortuary functions rather than legal pledges [2] [4].
5. Competing perspectives and limits of the record
All provided sources consistently date mortgage to medieval French/Latin origins and morgue to a later French institutional name; no source suggests the reverse [1] [2]. Available sources do not mention any credible evidence placing morgue earlier than the 18th century, nor do they document an earlier English use of morgue comparable to mortgage's medieval attestations [3] [4]. Limitations: the supplied corpus is selective — authoritative print sources like the Oxford English Dictionary are cited indirectly in one entry but full OED citation details are not supplied in these excerpts [6].
6. Bottom line — which word was invented first?
"Mortgage" is demonstrably older: it emerged in legal and Latin‑French vocabulary in the late 14th century and became established in English several centuries before "morgue," which derives from the 18th/19th‑century French La Morgue [1] [5] [2] [4].
Sources cited in this piece are the provided etymology summaries and articles: etymological and historical accounts of mortgage [1] [5] [6] [7] and morgue [2] [3] [4] [9].