Meaning

noun someone who has insufficient assets to cover their debts

verb reduce to bankruptcy

adjective financially ruined

originPartial calque of Italian bancarotta (literally “a broken bench”), from banca (“bank”, literally “bench”) + rotta (“broken, rupted”), which refers to an out-of-business bank, having its bench physically broken, signifying that the working moneylender was insolvent.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0