Word.ws English Dictionary

mortpay

mortpay noun: the crime of taking pay for the service of dead soldiers, or for services not actually rendered by soldiers.

Noun

mortpay (plural mortpays)

  1. (historical, obsolete) The crime of taking pay for the service of dead soldiers, or for services not actually rendered by soldiers.
    • the severe punishing of mortpays and keeping back soldiers' wages in captain1622, Francis, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban [i.e. Francis Bacon], The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh, […], London: […] W[illiam] Stansby for Matthew Lownes, and William Barret...

Forms of mortpay

pluralmortpays

Origin of mortpay

From French mort (“dead”) + English pay.

Questions about mortpay

What does mortpay mean?
Mortpay means the crime of taking pay for the service of dead soldiers, or for services not actually rendered by soldiers.
What part of speech is mortpay?
Mortpay is a noun.
What is the plural of mortpay?
The plural of mortpay is mortpays.

Words near mortpay in the dictionary

  1. Morton's toes
  2. Morton-on-Swale
  3. Mortonian
  4. Mortons
  5. Mortons Creek
  6. mortpay
  7. mortpays
  8. mortress
  9. mortresses
  10. mortrew
  11. mortrews

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mortpay (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “mortpay.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mortpay. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.