Where does the word "bankrupt" come from?

To go bankrupt is, word for word, to have a broken bench. Whether any bench was ever actually broken is another question.

In medieval Italy, money dealers did business at a table or bench, a banca. Etymonline says the word meant a moneylender's shop, literally "bench," and came into Italian from a Germanic source related to English bench. The second word, rotta, meant "broken." It came from Latin rupta, a form of rumpere, "to break."

Michael Quinion of World Wide Words warns against a tempting misreading. Rotta is not "rotten." The bench was broken, not decayed.

English picked the word up around the middle of the 16th century, through the French equivalent, banqueroute. Etymonline dates the noun, "insolvent person," to the 1530s, and the adjective to the 1560s. Early English spellings followed the French. Speakers then linked the second half with the Latin for "broken," and the spelling was remodeled into the familiar -rupt.

Now the vivid version. A popular story says that when an Italian banker failed, his bench was publicly smashed, and the phrase recorded the ritual. Quinion notes that Samuel Johnson retold this legend. Etymonline repeats it with a warning. The word is "said to have been so called from an old custom of breaking the bench of bankrupts," it says, "but the allusion probably is figurative."

Quinion is cautious too. He notes that the Italian word rotta also had figurative senses, such as "shipwrecked" or "defeated." A broken bench was a business that had collapsed. Nobody has shown that a hammer was involved.

The bench itself has other descendants in English. Bank, in the money sense, comes from the same Italian banca and French banque, both meaning "table." Etymonline dates it to the late 15th century as a money-dealer's counter or shop. Banquet comes from Italian banchetto, "small bench," first a snack eaten on a bench rather than at a table.

The breaking half has relatives too. Route goes back, according to the OED as quoted by Grammarphobia, to Latin via rupta, "a broken way," a road opened by force.