bankruptcy (n.)
Bankruptcy is what happens when someone cannot pay what they owe. It is built on bankrupt, which came into English from the Italian banca rotta: a broken bench.12
The bench is real. Banca was the ordinary Italian word for the table a money dealer worked at, and it is the same word that gave us bank. Rotta is broken, from the Latin rumpere.2
The breaking is the story. A dealer who could not meet his debts had his table broken in front of him, and that was the end of his trade. Samuel Johnson retold it in his dictionary of 1755.23
Nobody has produced evidence that it happened. The reading the dictionaries settle on is that rotta is figurative here, in the way an English business is said to be broken, and that no carpentry was involved. I could not confirm the custom.12
Breaking the instrument of an office was a real way of ending one. A degraded knight had his belt cut, his spurs struck off and his sword broken over his head; a Garter knight’s banner was pulled down and thrown out of the chapel; and judges have snapped the nib of the pen that signed a death sentence, on the reasoning that it should not be used again.45
Nothing I found joins any of that to the money dealer’s table. It does explain why the table is easy to picture: a reader who knows that a broken sword ends a knighthood will read a broken bench the same way.
The company filed for bankruptcy.