A person who is owed money by someone else; a creditor or one to whom a debt is due.
From Old French 'creance' (belief, trust, credit) derived from Latin 'credentia' (trust, confidence). The suffix '-er' denotes the agent noun. The meaning shifted from general trust to financial obligation over medieval and early modern periods.
This word is almost extinct in modern English, but it reveals how medieval people thought about money—debt was fundamentally about trust and belief between people, not just numbers on a ledger.
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