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expense

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ɪkˈspɛns//

A spending or consuming, often a disbursement of funds.

noun

  1. 1

    A spending or consuming, often a disbursement of funds.

    She went to great expense to ensure her children would get the best education.

    Buying the car was a big expense, but will be worth it in the long run.

    We had a training weekend in New York, at the expense of our company.

    Husband nature's riches from expense.

  2. 2

    The elimination or consumption of something, sometimes with the notion of loss or damage to the thing eliminated.

    Jones reached the final at the expense of Smith, who couldn't beat him.

  3. 3

    obsoleteLoss.

    And moan the expense of many a vanished sight.

Etymology

From Middle English expense, from Anglo-Norman expense and Old French espense, from Late Latin expēnsa, from Latin expendō. See expend. Doublet of speso.

verb

  1. 1

    To charge a cost against an expense account; to bill something to the company for which one works.

    It should be acceptable to expense a business lunch with a client.

Forms

plural
expenses
past tense
expensed
past participle
expensed
present participle
expensing
third person singular
expenses
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).