Word of the Week 5: Amort

Meaning: In older English, “amort” means dejected, spiritless, or lifeless. If someone looks “all amort,” they look drained or downcast. It can also mean a state of being almost dead. In modern usage, it survives mainly inside the word amortize (to pay off gradually), but that’s a separate meaning that grew out of a legal/financial sense of “mort” = death.

Etymology: It comes from Anglo-French amort, from Old French a mort (“to death”), based on the Latin ad mortem. So it literally meant “toward death” or “to the point of death.”

Example in a Sentence: “After hearing the bad news, he sat all amort by the fire, staring into the coals.”