Word Story
USURY is the practice of charging an unreasonably high rate of interest on money lent, especially when the lender uses the borrower’s desperation to extract more than the loan is worth. In older moral and legal writing, the word carried a strong stigma, treating the taking of any interest as suspect; today it usually points to exploitative lending rather than everyday bank fees. The term often appears in debates about payday loans, loan sharks, and consumer-protection rules, where critics argue that the terms trap people in cycles of debt. A memorable literary context is Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where the moneylender Shylock’s bond and the courtroom fight over it dramatize the period’s anxieties about lending, mercy, and revenge. The word can also be used more loosely to criticize any arrangement that feels like profiting unfairly from someone else’s need.