Paycheck

How to spell paycheck

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce paycheck

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does paycheck mean?

1. nounA payment given to an employee for work done, especially the cheque or deposit covering one pay period.

Paycheck in a sentence

• Most of his paycheck goes straight toward the mortgage each month.

• The company deposits every paycheck directly into a bank account.

Where does paycheck come from?

Language of origin: French

This is a transparent compound of two everyday words, 'pay' and 'check'. The first element 'pay' descends from the Latin pacare, meaning 'to pacify' or 'to satisfy'; it came into English through Old French paier, and the link is that settling a debt 'satisfies' or 'appeases' the person owed. The second element 'check' has a far stranger journey: it comes ultimately from the Persian shah, meaning 'king', by way of the chess term 'checkmate' (literally 'the king is dead'); the sense of 'verify' grew from the idea of stopping or controlling something, and from there it came to mean a written order for money that a bank must verify. American English fixed the money sense as 'check', while British and Canadian English kept the French-flavoured spelling 'cheque', so 'paycheck' with -ck is the American form and 'pay cheque' is the form usually seen in Britain and Canada. The compound itself is relatively modern, becoming common in the early twentieth century when wages were routinely paid by a bank instrument rather than cash. The whole word literally names the slip of paper that delivers your wages.

How the word is built

• pay (compensation for work)
• check (a written order for money, from American 'check')