Overtime

How to spell overtime

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce overtime

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does overtime mean?

1. nounTime worked beyond one's normal scheduled hours, or the additional pay earned for it.
2. adverbIn addition to one's regular working hours.
3. nounAn extra period of play added to a tied game to determine a winner.

Overtime in a sentence

• noun

  The warehouse staff earned double pay for every hour of overtime.

• adverb

  The whole team agreed to work overtime during the busy holiday season.

• noun

  The hockey match went into overtime after a late equalising goal.

• noun

  She put in three hours of overtime to finish the quarterly report.

• adverb

  He stayed overtime most nights to keep the project on track.

• noun

  Both teams were exhausted by the second period of overtime.

Where does overtime come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Overtime is a transparent compound built from two native English elements: 'over', from the Old English 'ofer' meaning 'above' or 'beyond', and 'time', from the Old English 'tima' meaning a stretch or period. Both halves descend from Germanic roots, so the word is thoroughly home-grown rather than borrowed from Latin or French. The compound itself is comparatively young, appearing in the nineteenth century as industrial workplaces began counting paid hours; it first described labour done beyond the agreed working day. From that factory and office sense it spread into sport, where in North American games 'overtime' came to name the extra period played to break a tie. Because it is a plain compound, the only real spelling point is remembering it is written as a single solid word, with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• over- (beyond, in excess of)
• time (the noun)