Providing for old age

The thirteenth entry is la perequazione, and it is the one word on this list an English reader cannot guess, although every piece of it is already familiar. It is built from the Latin per, right through, and aequare, to make level, so a perequazione is a levelling carried through to the end, applied evenly and leaving nothing outside it. That verb aequare is the one sitting inside « equal » and « equate », and, with a different prefix, inside « adequate », which names something that has been made level with a demand. Italian kept the compound as a working noun and handed it to administration: la perequazione delle pensioni is the adjustment that brings payments back into line with prices, and la perequazione automatica is that adjustment done by rule rather than argued over each year. English never built the compound, so where Italian has one noun it reaches for several — « uprating », « indexation », « an inflation adjustment » — each naming a mechanism rather than the idea underneath. Reading perequazione as a levelling also carries a reader through la perequazione fiscale and la perequazione urbanistica, where no pension is in sight.