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'Subprime'. An adjective, sometimes hyphenated - SUB-hyphen-PRIME. You may know the meaning of the word prime, and you’d be right if you thought that it usually has a positive sense, something good or at a high level. Prime time, for example – used to describe the peak TV viewing hours for advertisers.

You may also be aware of the prefix ‘sub’. Can you think of a word which begins with ‘sub’? Perhaps you thought of ‘submarine’ or ‘subway’ or even ‘substandard’? As you can see from these examples the prefix sub- means under or below, so substandard, for example, means below standard or bad quality. So we can guess that subprime means in some way below prime, not at the top level.

From around 2005, the word subprime started to feature with increasing frequency in the media. As the financial storm clouds began to gather, attention turned to subprime mortgage lending (the practice by banks and building societies of lending money to people with lower incomes or dubious credit ratings) as one of the causes of the crisis which was about to break. In fact, the word gained so much attention from the world’s media that in 2007 the American dialect society voted it ‘word of the year’, a slightly dubious honour, but one which reflected its notoriety.

The credit crunch demonstrates very nicely the effect that external circumstances have on the English language. It has inspired a veritable army of new words, such as ‘staycation’, a vacation spent at home due to the lack of cash, or ‘recessionista’ to refer to a woman who manages to remain fashionable despite the tough economic times. But it has also brought changes in the meaning of words, or different interpretations of words which already exist.

'Subprime' is one of those words which already existed, but whose meaning has changed. For a time in the 1990s it actually had a positive meaning when used to describe a lending rate offered to borrowers. If you got a subprime loan, it meant that you paid a slightly lower level of interest on your loan than the highest rate, in other words a preferential rate. Strangely, the meaning of the word reversed and the ‘subprime’ part came to describe the borrowers themselves. Subprime mortgages are now firmly established as one of the ‘bad guys’ in the story of the credit crunch, and it seems that subprime will from now on always be associated with collapsing banks and tumbling stock markets.

Jim Pettiward has a BA (hons) in French and Spanish, CTEFLA and Trinity TESOL Diploma. He has taught EFL, EAP, ESP and Business English in Ecuador, Venezuela, Hungary and the UK. He has also worked as an ICT trainer for the British Council and the University of the Arts, London. He is currently teaching English for Academic Purposes in the Department of Humanities, Arts, Languages and Education at London Metropolitan University.