The word payḫu, occurring only in Middle Babylonian texts from Nuzi and denoting a type of land, is most probably a loanword from Hurrian. As such, it has been analysed as a derived noun *pai from the base pa- “to build” (BGH 285) with the adjectival suffix -ġe, yielding pa-i-ġe “used for building”. The fact that the word is found many times in a unified form and was Akkadianized with the help of the nominative ending -u indicates that we are dealing with a deeply rooted loanword in the local Akkadian.