Adjunct Account

"Adjunct" is an underused word. Ad-junct. It sounds like you started to say an important, multi-syllable word..."adjoining" perhaps, or maybe "adjectivization"...but then had to stop in order to suppress a sneeze.

The word itself means something used in support of something else. Probably most of your secondary education was performed by adjunct professors, while your permanent professors were either on sabbatical in Croatia or buried in a lab somewhere.

In the context of finance, an adjunct account is an accounting concept that helps balance assets and liabilities when there's a certain kind of discrepancy between the sale price and the issue price of a debt security.

We know we might have lost you there, so let's break it down. A company sells a set of bonds, a type of security that basically represents a loan broken up into tradable bits. The firm issues $50,000 worth of bonds, but when it sells the bonds on the open market, they prove popular with investors, and the firm is able to sell them for $55,000.

Now the company has a liability on its books of $50,000 because it has to pay back the face value of those bonds. Meanwhile, it just raised $55,000 in cash from the sale...a fact that gets logged as an asset on its balance sheet. The $5,000 discrepancy needs to get reconciled. The adjunct account represents the tool to get this done. The $5,000 surplus is recorded in the adjunct account, keeping the balance sheet, well...in balance.

Fun fact: the opposite of an adjunct account is a contra account. "Contra" is another word that sounds like you started saying a longer word, but then got cut off for some reason. Like you had started to say something about "contradictory modality" but two syllables in, suddenly remembered that you might have left your iron plugged in.