Roman law used the word "dissolution of debt" (Latin solutio) to refer to the termination of a debt relationship by redemption (Latin liberatio). The debt relationship ended with the payment of the monetary debt. It was not until the Middle Ages that the Old High German "zalōn" and the Middle High German "zaln" came into being, both of which meant "to execute arithmetically, to present according to the rules of the art of numbers". The amount of payment was determined by a counting board, so that this process of paying off a debt was called payment.
The "Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste" by Johann Heinrich Zedler from 1749 deals with the concept of payment in great detail and defines payment as "restitution of what one owes to another, and occurs when one satisfies one's creditor either with cash or by settlement, instruction and the like". In 1794, the jurist Christoph Christian von Dabelow understood a payment to mean the cancellation of a debt by the payment of money. The jurist Julius Albert Gruchot (1805-1879) pointed out as early as 1871 that a payment was to be regarded as a legal transaction because it consisted of two concurrent declarations of intent by the payer and payee.
For the business economist Konrad Mellerowicz in 1952, payment was "any giving of money". With regard to the purpose of payment, he distinguished between consideration for a delivery (goods, machines, securities), performance (rent, wages, insurance premiums) and unilateral public debt relationships (taxes, customs duties, social security).
Laws today use the terms payment and repayment very frequently, but do not offer a legal definition. For example, the retention of title in Section 449 (1) of the German Civil Code (BGB) presupposes that the seller retains title to the goods until the purchase price has been paid. Payment is at the core of payment services law, which speaks of the payment transaction in Section 675f BGB.
