Skip to content
OneKitly

cash

nounverbadjectivenounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkaʃ//
  • Australia//ˈkæʃ//
  • Australia/[ˈkʰæʃ]/
  • New Zealand//ˈkɛʃ//

Money in the form of notes or bills and coins, as opposed to checks, credit or electronic transactions.

noun

  1. 1

    Money in the form of notes or bills and coins, as opposed to checks, credit or electronic transactions.

    After you bounced those checks last time, they want to be paid in cash.

  2. 2

    Liquid assets, money that can be traded quickly, as distinct from assets that are invested and cannot be easily exchanged.

    Cash offers a return of virtually zero in many developed countries […].

  3. 3

    informalMoney.

    Paying yourself first also implies that you have some understanding of your cash flow, which means that, yes, you must set a budget.

  4. 4

    Cash register, or the counter in a business where the cash register is located.

    Let me just bring these to the cash for you.

    Visit Apple’s jam-packed stores and you won’t see lines at the cash — because every sales clerk is also your cashier, using cellphone card-readers to zip you through.

  5. 5

    An instance of winning a cash prize.

    In the WSOP, I have played around 150 tournaments with one final table, 11 cashes, and a -70 percent ROI.

  6. 6

    archaicA place where money is kept, or where it is deposited and paid out; a money box.

    This bank[…] is properly a general cash, where every man lodges his money,

    She was said to have amassed a great sum of money for ill use ; 20,000l. are known to be in her cash ;

Etymology

From late Middle French caisse (“money-box”), itself borrowed from Occitan caissa, from Latin capsa (“box”), ultimately from capiō (“take, seize”), from Proto-Indo-European *kap- (“grasp”). Doublet of case, chase, and chasse. Compare Spanish caja (“box”).

verb

  1. 1

    To exchange (a check/cheque) for money in the form of notes/bills.

    My single "Lick and Move" had made it to number four on the Top Ten charts, and I had gotten a nice check from Ruthless Rap. I cashed that shit and took Muddah shopping in Midtown and told her to get any damn thing she wanted.

  2. 2

    slangTo obtain a payout from a tournament.

adjective

  1. 1

    slangGreat; excellent; cool.

noun

  1. 1

    historicalThe low-denomination coin of southern India until 1818.

  2. 2

    historicalAny of several similar coins in Southeast and East Asia, particularly the imperial Chinese copper coin.

    Shentzŭ is the Chinese name for what we would call a mule litter. As this conveyance can go over almost any kind of road, I decided on it, and engaged two mules for the litter, and a donkey for the baggage: the three animals with the shentzŭ and a man cost 1300 cash per day when we travelled, and 700 cash per day when we rested from any cause.

Etymology

Variant of earlier cass under influence from cash above, from Tamil காசு (kācu), ultimately from Sanskrit karsha ("weight of 1/400 tulā, तुला"). Extended to other similar forms of low-denomination coins in Southeast and East Asia following the example of cognate Portuguese cas, casse, caxa, caixa.

verb

  1. 1

    To disband. To do away with, to kill.

    He cashed the old souldiers, and supplied their roumes with yong beginners.

Etymology

See cashier.

Forms

plural
cashes
comparative
more cash
superlative
most cash
past tense
cashed
past participle
cashed
present participle
cashing
third person singular
cashes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).