mortuary [LME] In the Middle Ages a mortuary was a gift claimed by a parish priest from a deceased person’s estate. The word derives from Latin mortuus ‘dead’, the source also of mortgage [LME], literally a ‘dead pledge’ because the debt dies when the pledge is redeemed; and mortify [LME] ‘deaden’, and related to *murder. The current sense, ‘a room or building in which dead bodies are kept’, dates from the mid 19th century. In Paris the bodies of people found dead formerly were taken to a building at the eastern end of the Île de la Cité, where they were kept until identified. It was called the Morgue (from a French word for haughtiness or sad expression). By the 1830s morgue was being used in English for other mortuaries; the parallel use of French morgue is not recorded until the 1940s and was borrowed back from English.