Past tense of escrow; held in the custody of a third party until conditions of a contract are fulfilled.
From the noun escrow, derived from Old French escroue (a scroll or strip of parchment), because escrow agreements were written on such documents.
When you buy a house, your down payment gets 'escrowed'—held by a neutral party—and this banking practice goes straight back to medieval parchment documents that spelled out agreements between distrustful parties.
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