Wages

How to spell wages

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wages

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wages mean?

1. nounA regular payment earned by a worker, usually calculated by the hour or week, for labour done.
2. verbThird-person singular form of 'wage': to carry on or conduct a campaign, war, or sustained effort.

Wages in a sentence

• noun

  The factory wages are paid every Friday afternoon.

• verb

  The government wages a long campaign against tax fraud.

• noun

  Rising rents are swallowing a larger share of ordinary wages.

• verb

  The charity wages a steady battle to reduce homelessness.

Where does wages come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the Anglo-Norman French wage, meaning a pledge or security, which entered English in the 1300s. That French form traced back to a Germanic root, the Frankish wadja meaning a pledge or guarantee, the same ancestor that gives us the English verb 'to wed' (originally to pledge oneself). Because the word arrived through Norman French, English ended up with a doublet: 'wage' and 'gage' (as in 'engage' and 'mortgage') both descend from that single pledge-word, the difference in the opening sound reflecting northern versus central French pronunciation. The sense narrowed over time from a general pledge to a specific promise of payment, and then to the regular payment a worker earns for labour. The plural 'wages' became the ordinary way to speak of weekly or hourly earnings, distinct from a monthly 'salary', and the soft 'g' before the 'e' is exactly what keeps the spelling regular despite the hard-sounding root.

How the word is built

• wage (payment, pledge)
• -s (plural / third-person verb ending)