Payoff

How to spell payoff

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce payoff

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does payoff mean?

1. nounThe reward, benefit, or final result that comes from an effort or investment.
2. nounA sum of money given secretly and illegally as a bribe.

Payoff in a sentence

• After years of saving, the payoff was a fully paid mortgage.

• The inspector was arrested for accepting a payoff from the contractor.

• The months of training delivered a real payoff at the marathon.

• Investigators traced the payoff through several offshore accounts.

Where does payoff come from?

Language of origin: French

This is a compound formed inside English from the verb 'pay' and the particle 'off'. 'Pay' arrived in the 1200s through Old French 'paier', which descended from the Latin 'pacare', literally 'to pacify' or 'to make peaceful'; the connection is that handing over money was a way of settling a quarrel or satisfying a creditor, so 'pay' once carried the sense of 'appease' before it narrowed to the modern money meaning. The particle 'off' is a native Germanic word signalling away-ness or completion, the same 'off' that lets you pay something off entirely. As a single noun, 'payoff' is fairly recent, emerging in American English in the early twentieth century to mean the moment of settling up or the reward at the end of an effort, and it quickly picked up the shadier sense of a bribe. The spelling trap is purely the joined form: it is one word with a doubled-letter junction (pay + off), not 'payof' and not the open 'pay off' that is correct for the verb phrase.

How the word is built

• pay (to give money owed)
• off (adverbial particle, here marking completion or settlement)