cheap

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English[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English cheep, chepe/chepen, chep, cheap/cheapien, chapien, from Old English cēap (“cattle, purchase, sale”), ċēapian (“to bargain, chaffer, trade”), from Proto-West Germanic *kaup (“trade, purchase”), *kaupōn (“to buy, trade”), from Proto-Germanic *kaupōną, *kaupijaną (“to buy, trade”), *kaupô (“inn-keeper, merchant”), from Latin caupō (“tradesman, innkeeper”). See also chapman. For sense evolution to "inexpensive," compare bargain or French bon marché.

Cognates

Cognate with Scots chepe (“to sell”), chape (“sale price”), North Frisian keap (“purchase”), West Frisian keap (“purchase, buy, acquisition”), Dutch koop (“buy, purchase, deal”), kopen (“to buy, purchase, shop”), Low German kopen (“to buy”), German Kauf (“trade, traffic, bargain, purchase, buy”), kaufen (“to buy”), Swedish köp (“bargain, purchase”), köpa (“to buy, purchase”), Norwegian Nynorsk kjøpa (“to buy, purchase”), Icelandic kaup (“purchase, bargain”), kaupa (“to purchase”); also borrowed as Finnish kauppa (“shop, trade”).

Noun[edit]

cheap (countable and uncountable, plural cheaps)

  1. (obsolete) Trade; traffic; chaffer; chaffering.
  2. (obsolete) A market; marketplace.
  3. Price.
  4. (obsolete) A low price; a bargain.
  5. Cheapness; lowness of price; abundance of supply. (Can we add an example for this sense?)

Adjective[edit]

cheap (comparative cheaper, superlative cheapest)

  1. Low and/or reduced in price.
    • 1691, [John Locke], Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money. […], London: […] Awnsham and John Churchill, […], published 1692, OCLC 933799310:
      Where there are many sellers and few purchases, land will be cheap.
    • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter III, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 4293071:
      One saint's day in mid-term a certain newly appointed suffragan-bishop came to the school chapel, and there preached on “The Inner Life.”  He at once secured attention by his informal method, and when presently the coughing of Jarvis […] interrupted the sermon, he altogether captivated his audience with a remark about cough lozenges being cheap and easily procurable.
    • 2013 July 20, “Out of the gloom”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845:
      [Rural solar plant] schemes are of little help to industry or other heavy users of electricity. Nor is solar power yet as cheap as the grid. For all that, the rapid arrival of electric light to Indian villages is long overdue. When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages.
  2. Of poor quality.
  3. Of little worth.
  4. (slang, of an action or tactic in a game of skill) Underhand or unfair.
    the cheap trick of hiding deadly lava under pushable blocks
  5. (informal, chiefly derogatory) Stingy; mean; excessively frugal.
    Insurance is expensive, but don't be so cheap that you risk losing your home because of a fire.
  6. (finance) Trading at a price level which is low relative to historical trends, a similar asset, or (for derivatives) a theoretical value.
    The ETF is trading cheap to NAV right now; we can arb this by buying the ETF and selling the underlying constituents.

Synonyms[edit]

Antonyms[edit]

Related terms[edit]

terms derived from cheap

See also[edit]

Translations[edit]

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked

Verb[edit]

cheap (third-person singular simple present cheaps, present participle cheaping, simple past and past participle cheaped)

  1. (intransitive, obsolete) To trade; traffic; bargain; chaffer; ask the price of goods; cheapen goods.
  2. (transitive, obsolete) To bargain for; chaffer for; ask the price of; offer a price for; cheapen.
  3. (transitive, obsolete) To buy; purchase.
  4. (transitive, obsolete) To sell.

Derived terms[edit]

Usage notes[edit]

Use of cheap as a verb has been surpassed by cheapen.

Adverb[edit]

cheap (comparative more cheap, superlative most cheap)

  1. Cheaply.
    • March 24 1658, John Milton, letter to Emeric Bigot
      I need not request you to purchase them as cheap as possible

Anagrams[edit]

Chinese[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from English cheap.

Pronunciation[edit]

Adjective[edit]

cheap

  1. (Cantonese) Stingy; mean; excessively frugal.

Irish[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

cheap m

  1. Lenited form of ceap.

Verb[edit]

cheap

  1. past indicative analytic of ceap
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