Discount

How to spell discount

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce discount

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does discount mean?

1. nounAn amount deducted from the usual cost of something.
2. verbTo reduce the usual price of goods or services.
3. verbTo regard a claim or possibility as unreliable or unlikely.

Discount in a sentence

• noun

  The store offered a ten percent discount on all winter coats.

• verb

  Retailers often discount last season's stock to clear shelf space.

• verb

  The detective refused to discount the witness account so quickly.

• noun

  Members receive a generous discount on every booking.

• verb

  The airline will discount fares heavily during the quiet months.

• verb

  Experts discount the rumour as having no factual basis.

Where does discount come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the prefix dis-, meaning 'away' or 'off', joined to count, which traces back through Old French conter to the Latin computare, 'to reckon up' or 'to calculate' (the same root that gives us 'compute'). The combined form first appears in commercial English in the early 1600s, originally as the verb 'to discompt' or 'discount', meaning to deduct an amount when reckoning a bill or settling a debt. The literal idea was to 'count off' part of the sum, and from this accounting sense the familiar meaning of a price reduction grew naturally. By the 1700s a figurative sense had developed too: to 'discount' a story or a claim meant to mentally subtract its weight, that is, to treat it as less than fully reliable. The spelling stays regular and phonetic, so the only real trap is remembering that the everyday accounting word and the dismissive word are the same one.

How the word is built

• dis- (away, off)
• count (from Latin computare: to reckon, calculate)