Definition 1: (1) An income payment made once a year or over the course of a year; (2) a specified investment income, especially for retirement, payable at stated intervals for a fixed period, often for the recipient's life with any remainder distributed among his heirs or other participants in the plan.

Usage 1: The plural of today's word is "annuities." A person receiving an annuity is an annuitant. The verb, "annuitize," means simply to begin the payments from the accumulated funds in a retirement or other annuity.

Suggested usage: This word is used today most often to refer to a retirement plan: "Mustafa Gahtan resigned as company president when he realized that the income from the annuities he had given himself over his 10-year presidency would be greater than his current salary." However, in the past it was used more often to refer to the financial support of patrons of artists, "Beethoven's patron in Vienna, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, gave him an annuity of 600 florins beginning in 1800."

Etymology: Today's word comes to us from Medieval Latin annuitas "yearly" who made it up from earlier Latin annus "year," an oblique case form of which we use in per annum "yearly." "Annus" was originally *at-nos, which means the original Proto-Indo-European root was, oddly enough, *at- "to go." In Sanskrit it emerges as atati "goes, wanders" but in the Germanic languages and Latin it meant "year." The Latin word lurks inside many English words, including, "annals," "annual," "anniversary," "millennium," and "perennial."