What does amort mean?
Amort is an adjective meaning dead, derived from the Old French phrase à mort, 'to death'. Though its plain sense of lifelessness has fallen out of ordinary use, the word survives in legal history through its connection with mortmain — literally the 'dead hand'. Land granted in amort was conveyed to a corporation, typically a religious house, in perpetuity: because such bodies never died, the land never reverted to the lord or crown through feudal inheritance. Medieval English kings viewed this as a serious loss of revenue and control, culminating in the Statute of Mortmain of 1279, which restricted such alienations. Today amort appears mainly in historical and legal scholarship, while its linguistic descendants — most prominently amortize, the gradual extinguishing of a debt — carry the same root into modern financial vocabulary.
adjectiveDead; deprived of life. In legal usage, describes property held 'in mortmain' — conveyed to a corporation or religious body so that it remains permanently inalienable, as if held by a 'dead hand'.
- Dead; deprived of life (archaic).
- (Law) Of land or property: held in mortmain, i.e. permanently conveyed to a corporation or ecclesiastical body so that it cannot revert or be alienated.
"The medieval statute forbade land to be given in amort to any religious house without royal licence."
"Under the Statute of Mortmain, no land could be granted in amort to a monastery without the king's consent."
"In older legal texts, 'amort' simply denoted a person who was dead."
Amort literally means 'dead' — and medieval kings hated it, because land given 'in amort' to the Church never died and never came back to the crown.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of amort
Amort comes from the Old French expression à mort, meaning 'to death', itself rooted in Latin mors, 'death'. The word entered English in the medieval period largely through legal usage, where it described land conveyed in perpetuity to a corporate owner — a holding likened to a dead hand because the owner could never die and pass the property on. It shares this Latin root with a family of death-related words including mortal, mortuary, and mortgage, whose name combines mors with the pledge of a gage.
How amort is actually used
Amort is archaic and now encountered almost exclusively in historical and legal contexts concerning mortmain. Its everyday legacy survives indirectly through the related word 'amortize', which shares the same root.
Easily confused with amort
Amortize is a verb meaning to gradually pay off a debt or write off an asset's cost over time, whereas amort is an adjective describing something as dead or legally inalienable.
Mortmain ('dead hand') is the noun naming the legal condition of perpetual corporate landholding, while amort is the adjective describing land so held.