Cheap

How to spell cheap

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cheap

What does cheap mean?

1. adjectiveCosting little money; low in price.
2. adjectiveOf low quality, often because it was made to cost little.
3. adjectiveUnwilling to spend or give money; mean with cash.

Cheap in a sentence

• The supermarket sells cheap vegetables near closing time.

• The chair broke after a week because the plastic was so cheap.

• He was too cheap to leave even a small tip.

• They booked a cheap flight by travelling midweek.

• The hotel felt cheap, with thin towels and peeling paint.

• Their boss is notoriously cheap about office supplies.

Where does cheap come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun ceap, which meant a bargain, a sale, or a price, and more broadly the business of buying and selling. That noun was itself an early Germanic borrowing of the Latin caupo, meaning a small trader or innkeeper, which tells you how far back the commercial sense reaches. For centuries English speakers used the phrase 'good cheap' to mean a good bargain, and over time the adjective sense 'costing little' broke free and stood on its own, so that by the 1500s 'cheap' simply meant inexpensive. The same root still hides inside English place names like Cheapside, the old London market street, and inside the surname Chapman, originally a trader. The spelling keeps the 'ea' that voices the long vowel, and it remains a perfect homophone of 'cheep', the thin sound a young bird makes, which is the trap to watch.

How the word is built

• cheap (single Old English root ceap: a bargain, trade, or price; no prefix or suffix)