cheap

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Archived revision by ToilBot (talk | contribs) as of 07:52, 31 December 2019.
Jump to navigation Jump to search

English

Pronunciation

Alternative forms

Etymology

From (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Middle English cheep, chepe/chepen, chep, cheap/cheapien, chapien, from (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Old English cēap (“cattle, purchase, sale, traffic, business, bargain, gain, payment, value, price, goods, possessions, property, market, saleable commodities, trade”), ċēapian (“to bargain, chaffer, trade, to contract for the purchase or sale of, buy, bribe, endeavor to bribe”), from (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Proto-Germanic *kaupaz, *kaupô (“inn-keeper, merchant”), (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Proto-Germanic *kaupōną, *kaupijaną (“to buy, purchase”), from (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Latin caupō (“tradesman, innkeeper”), related to Ancient Greek κάπηλος (kápēlos, “huckster”), likely a common Mediterranean borrowing into several IE languages, more at caupō. 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

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.
    • (Can we date this quote by Shakespeare and provide title, author’s full name, and other details?)
      The sack that thou hast drunk me would have bought me lights as good cheap at the dearest chandler's in Europe.
  5. Cheapness; lowness of price; abundance of supply. (Can we add an example for this sense?)

Adjective

cheap (comparative cheaper, superlative cheapest)

  1. Low and/or reduced in price.
    • (Can we date this quote by John Locke and provide title, author’s full name, and other details?)
      Where there are a great sellers to a few buyers, there the thing to be sold will be cheap.
    • 1918, W. B. Maxwell, chapter 3, in The Mirror and the Lamp:
      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.
    • (Can we date this quote by Dryden and provide title, author’s full name, and other details?)
      You grow cheap in every subject's eye.
  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
Antonyms
Related terms
terms derived from cheap

Template:rel-mid

See also
Translations
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

Verb

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

Usage notes

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

Adverb

cheap (comparative more cheap, superlative most cheap)

  1. Cheaply.
    (Can we find and add a quotation of Milton to this entry?)

Anagrams

Irish

Pronunciation

Noun

cheap m

  1. Lenited form of ceap.

Verb

cheap

  1. past indicative analytic of ceap
Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=cheap&oldid=58264014"