life assurance
- noun
- /laɪf əˈʃʊərəns/
- UK
:
seguro de vida
- The life assurance provided peace of mind, knowing that his children would receive funds for their education upon his passing.
Examples
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John took out a life assurance policy to ensure his family would be financially secure if anything happened to him.
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"As a life assurance company, we sell income protection policies, and claims involving mental ill health form a significant proportion of the total made against this type of insurance," he says.
Academic text (2014) -
If the eternal life assurance peddled by the Methodists was easy to sell on the mainland, it nearly sold itself to a people whose breadwinners risked sudden death daily on a treacherous bay.
Academic text (1994) -
Many people consider life assurance essential for protecting their loved ones from financial hardship after their death.
Synonyms
91
3.0
A plan that pays money to your family or other people you choose when you die
8
4.5
A type of life insurance that pays money after your death
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'assurance' (an insurance policy) qualified by 'life' clearly indicates an insurance policy related to a person's life (i.e., payment on death). This construction is cross-linguistically common (e.g., 'seguro de vida', 'assurance vie') and follows standard noun + noun modifier patterns, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Life assurance comes from the idea of a promise about life. One popular story says the word assurance originally meant 'a promise' that something will happen; because death is certain, the promise was to pay money when someone 'dies', so life assurance today means a policy that will pay the people chosen to get the money after the insured person dies.