dispense.
To issue, distribute, or give out.
Meaning & usage
To issue, distribute, or give out.
To apply, as laws to particular cases; to administer; to execute; to manage; to direct.
To supply or make up a medicine or prescription.
The pharmacist dispensed my tablets.
An optician can dispense spectacles.
To give a dispensation to (someone); to excuse.
Every spring, the passive aggressive archbishop suffered from a brief flu that dispensed him from needing to provide Easter service to the king.
She was dispensed from her vows and married Captain von Trapp.
To compensate; to make up; to make amends.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English, from Old French dispenser, from Latin dispēnsāre (“to weigh out, pay out, distribute, regulate, manage, control, dispense”), frequentative of dispendere (“to weigh out”), from dis- (“apart”) + pendere (“to weigh”).
Cost, expenditure.
The act of dispensing, dispensation.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English, from Old French dispenser, from Latin dispēnsāre (“to weigh out, pay out, distribute, regulate, manage, control, dispense”), frequentative of dispendere (“to weigh out”), from dis- (“apart”) + pendere (“to weigh”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.