Salary

How to spell salary

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce salary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does salary mean?

1. nounA fixed regular payment, usually monthly, made by an employer to an employee.

Salary in a sentence

• Her new salary covers the mortgage with room to spare.

• The company reviews each salary at the end of the financial year.

Where does salary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word salary comes from the Latin salarium, which referred to an allowance or payment, and was built directly on sal, the Latin word for 'salt'. The popular explanation is that Roman soldiers received money to buy salt, a valuable commodity in the ancient world, though scholars now treat that neat story with some caution and think salarium more broadly meant a stipend or allowance. The word travelled into English through Anglo-French and Old French salaire during the 1300s, settling into its modern sense of regular wages paid for work. The same salt root survives in everyday phrases like being 'worth one's salt', which echoes the idea of earning one's keep. The single 'l' and the unstressed middle vowel are the spots writers slip on, since the word sounds like 'sal-uh-ree' but the second vowel is written as an 'a'.

How the word is built

• salar- (from Latin salarium, salt money)
• -y (noun suffix)