employ.
To retain (someone) as an employee.
Meaning & usage
To retain (someone) as an employee.
Our company employs hundreds of people.
To provide (someone) with a new job; to hire.
Yesterday our local garage employed a new mechanic.
To use (someone or something) for a job or task.
The burglar employed a jemmy to get in.
To make busy; to preoccupy.
Where this word comes from
From late Middle English emploien, imploien, emplien (“to apply to a specific purpose”), from Anglo-Norman emploier, Old French emploiier (“to entangle, fabricate, to make use of”), ultimately from Latin implicāre (“to infold, entangle, involve, engage”), from in- (“in”) + plicāre (“to fold”). Doublet of imply and implicate.
The state of being an employee; employment.
The school district has six thousand teachers in its employ.
An occupation.
The act of employing someone or making use of something; employment.
Where this word comes from
Borrowed from French emploi (“job, employment”), the deverbal from employer (“to put to use, to employ”), first attested in the late 17th century.
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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.