cheap
/ˈt͡ʃiːp/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.71 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Trading at a price level which is low relative to historical trends, a similar asset, or (for derivatives) a theoretical value.
adj
Taking little of system time or resources.
Example Sentences
- "Where there are many sellers and few purchases, land will be cheap."
- "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."
- "Datacasting bypasses the wired, terrestrial Internet and is a cheaper way to distribute software than pressing and mailing CDs."
- "The cheapest antiager around: a good moisturizer."
- "Such [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."
- "McDonald’s has been vocal about adding more chicken to its menu, which is generally cheaper than beef."
Etymology
As a noun, from Middle English chep, from Old English cēap (“trade, market, value”), from Proto-West Germanic *kaup. As a verb, from Middle English chepen, from Old English ċēapian (“to buy, bargain, trade”), from Proto-West Germanic *kaupōn, from Proto-Germanic *kaupōną, a verbal derivative of *kaupô (“trader”), from Latin caupō. The adjective originated as a shortening of Middle and Early Modern English good cheap, literally “good purchase” (as in “that was good cheap”, i.e. “that was [a] good purchase”). Compare Dutch goedkoop, 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”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Usage
Inflected Forms
cheaper (comparative)
cheapest (superlative)
chap (alternative, dialectal)
chop (alternative, dialectal)
ch3ap (alternative)
cheaps (plural)
cheaps (present, singular)
cheaping (participle, present)
cheaped (participle, past)
cheaped (past)
more cheap (comparative)
most cheap (superlative)