Trendy Word

Tranche seems to be a trendy word. It means slice or portion, though why it should be preferable to those words or part, piece, chunk, hunk, bit, section, division, third, fourth... or whatever, is not clear. It comes in through finance talk, where it has been in use to signify a portion of a loan or deal, a piece of money, a section of capital. The noun turns into a verb and more commonly a participle: tranching is a process of dividing a deal into separate liens or timed disbursements, bonds into classes, and so on.