Wiktionary

cheap

English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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Inherited 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”), Russian купить (kupitʹ, “to purchase”), Old Church Slavonic коупити (kupiti, “to purchase”), Bulgarian ку́пя (kúpja, “to purchase”), Serbo-Croatian купити (“to purchase”), Czech koupit (“to purchase”), Polish kupić (“to purchase”).

Pronunciation

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Adjective

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cheap (comparative cheaper, superlative cheapest)

  1. Low or reduced in price.
    Synonyms: inexpensive; affordable; (attributive) bargain; good value; see also Thesaurus:expensive § Antonyms
    Antonyms: expensive, dear (chiefly Commonwealth English), costly, pricey; see also Thesaurus:expensive
    • 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:
      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:
      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.
    • 2000, George Abe, Residential Broadband, Cisco Systems, →ISBN:
      Datacasting bypasses the wired, terrestrial Internet and is a cheaper way to distribute software than pressing and mailing CDs.
    • 2008, Amy Wechsler, The Mind-Beauty Connection, page 31:
      The cheapest antiager around: a good moisturizer.
    • 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.
    • 2024 October 3, Jordan Valinsky, “McDonald’s is finally selling the Chicken Big Mac in the US”, in CNN‎[1]:
      McDonald’s has been vocal about adding more chicken to its menu, which is generally cheaper than beef.
  2. Of poor quality.
    Synonyms: low-quality, shoddy
    Hyponyms: flimsy, tinny
    Coordinate terms: basic, simple; primitive, naive; utilitarian, unadorned; crude, rough, mean, rude
  3. Of little worth.
    Synonym: unvaluable
    Antonyms: precious, valuable; invaluable, priceless
    Coordinate terms: valueless, worthless
  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.
    Antonym: rich
    The ETF is trading cheap to NAV right now; we can arb this by buying the ETF and selling the underlying constituents.
  7. (computing) Taking little of system time or resources.
    the algorithm is cheap to compute

Usage notes

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  • Because cheap is polysemically ambiguous, it is not always clear whether the intended meaning is inexpensive, poorly made, or both; apt word choice, with terms such as good value or shoddy, can clarify.

Derived terms

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Descendants

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Translations

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

See also

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Noun

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cheap (countable and uncountable, plural cheaps)

  1. (obsolete) Trade; traffic; chaffer; chaffering.
  2. (obsolete) A market; marketplace.
  3. (obsolete) Price.
  4. (obsolete) A low price; a bargain.
  5. (obsolete) Cheapness; lowness of price; abundance of supply.

See also

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Verb

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

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

Usage notes

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  • The use of cheap as a verb has been superseded by cheapen.

Derived terms

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Adverb

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cheap (comparative more cheap, superlative most cheap)

  1. Cheaply.
    I bought this cheap in a junk shop.
    The pet shop has some budgerigars going cheap.
    • March 24 1658, John Milton, letter to Emeric Bigot
      I need not request you to purchase them as cheap as possible

Anagrams

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Chinese

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Etymology

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From English cheap.

Pronunciation

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Adjective

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cheap

  1. (Cantonese, of people) stingy; mean; excessively frugal
  2. (Cantonese) cheap; low-priced; bearing poor quality

References

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Irish

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Pronunciation

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Noun

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cheap m

  1. Lenited form of ceap.

Verb

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cheap

  1. past indicative analytic of ceap
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