Word of the Day:
defalcation
What It Means
The act of cancelling part of a claim by deducting a smaller claim which the claimant owes to the defendant.
Defalcation in Context
““Why should Eldridge commit murder?[…]There was only one possible motive—namely, he wished to avoid detection as James Selby of Anaconda Ltd. He had settled down in Estrepps. There were several persons in the town who had suffered from his defalcations.[…]””
Did You Know?
Late 15th century, from Medieval Latin dēfalcātiōnem, accusative singular of dēfalcātiō (literally “cutting off, lopping off with a sickle”), nominalization of dēfalcō, from Latin dē (“off”) + falx (“sickle, scythe, pruning hook”), from which also English falcate (“sickle-shaped”). By surface analysis, defalcate + -ion (“the act of”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: defalcation (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “defalcation.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/defalcation. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
