Meaning of pay | Babel Free

Definitions

1. To cover (the bottom of a vessel, a seam, a spar, etc.) with tar or pitch, or a waterproof composition of tallow, resin, etc.; to smear.
   transitive
2. To give money or other compensation to in exchange for goods or services.
   ambitransitive
3. To discharge, as a debt or other obligation, by giving or doing what is due or required.
   ambitransitive
4. To reduce (a debt) through payment.
5. To be profitable for.
   transitive
6. To give over the full monetary amount demanded.
7. To yield as a benefit.
   transitive
8. To earn a given right or position through hard work, long-term experience, or suffering: She paid her dues in small-town theaters before being cast in a Broadway play.
9. To give (something else than money).
   transitive
10. To contribute one's own share; pay for oneself.
11. To be profitable or worth the effort.
    intransitive
12. To bear the consequences of something.
13. To discharge an obligation or debt.
    intransitive
14. To pay excessively.
15. To suffer consequences.
    intransitive
16. To coat or cover (seams of a ship, for example) with waterproof material such as tar or asphalt.
17. To admit that a joke, punchline, etc., was funny.
    transitive
18. to coat or cover (seams, a ship's bottom, etc.) with pitch, tar, or the like.
19. To exact revenge for or from:avenge, pay off, redress, repay, requite, vindicate.
20. Payment for work done:compensation, earnings, emolument, fee, hire, remuneration, salary, stipend, wage.

Equivalents

Examples

“How much will the job pay?”

“he paid him to clean the place up”

“he paid her off the books and in kind where possible”

“This time was most dreadful for Lilian. Thrown on her own resources and almost penniless, she maintained herself and paid the rent of a wretched room near the hospital by working as a charwoman, sempstress, anything.”

“Admiral Hackett: You can pay a soldier to fire a gun. You can pay him to charge the enemy. But you can't pay him to believe.”

“The dirty secret of the internet is that all this distraction and interruption is immensely profitable. Web companies like to boast about[…]and so on. But the real way to build a successful online business is to be better than your rivals at undermining people's control of their own attention. Partly, this is a result of how online advertising has traditionally worked: advertisers pay for clicks, and a click is a click, however it's obtained.”

“she offered to pay the bill”

“he has paid his debt to society”

“The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again.”

“The petty ſtreames that paie a dailie det / To their ſalt ſoveraigne with their freſh fals haſt, / Adde to his flowe, but alter not his taſt.”

“Yet in “Through a Latte, Darkly”, a new study of how Starbucks has largely avoided paying tax in Britain, Edward Kleinbard […] shows that current tax rules make it easy for all sorts of firms to generate what he calls “stateless income”: […]. In Starbucks’s case, the firm has in effect turned the process of making an expensive cup of coffee into intellectual property.”

“It didn't pay him to keep the store open any more.”

“to pay dividends or interest”

“to pay attention”

“not paying me a welcome”

“They stayed together during three dances, went out on to the terrace, explored wherever they were permitted to explore, paid two visits to the buffet, and enjoyed themselves much in the same way as if they had been school-children surreptitiously breaking loose from an assembly of grown-ups.”

“crime doesn’t pay”

“it will pay to wait”

“He was allowed to go as soon as he paid.”

“He paid for his fun in the sun with a terrible sunburn.”

“Sutho took a pull at his Johnny Walker and Coke and laughed that trademark laugh of his and said: `Okay. I'll pay that all right.'”

CEFR level