garnishee
- noun
- /ˌɡɑrnɪˈʃi/
- Jargon
:
embargado
- After the lawsuit, the judge named the bank as the garnishee because they held the defendant's funds.
Examples
-
Employers must notify their employees when they become a garnishee for a court-ordered wage deduction.
-
The garnishee gives to the court and is compensated by the extinction of its creditor's asset.
Blog text (33) -
The court ordered the employer to act as the garnishee and withhold part of his salary to pay off the debt.
Surface Forms
Morphology
garnishee = garnish (semi-transparent) = garnish + ee
Formed by the productive suffix '-ee' meaning a person affected by an action, but the verb 'garnish' here is a legal sense (withholding wages) that is specialized and differs from the common 'decorate' sense, so learners may not reliably infer the meaning.
Etymology
Garnishee comes from the old French verb garnir, which meant 'to hold' or 'provide', and is the same root as the English word garnish; in law it came to mean the person who 'holds' someone else's money, so a garnishee is the person whose wages or funds can be taken to pay a debt.
