expense.
A spending or consuming, often a disbursement of funds.
Meaning & usage
A spending or consuming, often a disbursement of funds.
She went to great expense to ensure her children would get the best education.
Buying the car was a big expense, but will be worth it in the long run.
The elimination or consumption of something, sometimes with the notion of loss or damage to the thing eliminated.
Jones reached the final at the expense of Smith, who couldn't beat him.
Loss.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English expense, from Anglo-Norman expense and Old French espense, from Late Latin expēnsa, from Latin expendō. See expend. Doublet of speso.
To charge a cost against an expense account; to bill something to the company for which one works.
It should be acceptable to expense a business lunch with a client.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English expense, from Anglo-Norman expense and Old French espense, from Late Latin expēnsa, from Latin expendō. See expend. Doublet of speso.
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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.