/t͡ʃiːp/
OriginAs a noun, from Middle English chep, from Old English cēap (“trade, market, value”), from Proto-West Germanic *kaup. As a verb, from Middle English chepen, from Old English ċēapian (“to buy, bargain, trade”), from Proto-West Germanic *kaupōn, from Proto-Germanic *kaupōną, a verbal derivative of *kaupô (“trader”), from Latin caupō.
The adjective originated as a shortening of Middle and Early Modern English good cheap, literally “good purchase” (as in “that was good cheap”, i.e. “that was [a] good purchase”). Compare Dutch goedkoop, French bon marché.
Cognates
Cognate with Scots chepe (“to sell”), chape (“sale price”), North Frisian keap (“purchase”), West Frisian keap (“purchase, buy, acquisition”), Dutch koop (“buy, purchase, deal”), kopen (“to buy, purchase, shop”), Low German kopen (“to buy”), German Kauf (“trade, traffic, bargain, purchase, buy”), kaufen (“to buy”), Swedish köp (“bargain, purchase”), köpa (“to buy, purchase”), Norwegian Nynorsk kjøpa (“to buy, purchase”), Icelandic kaup (“purchase, bargain”), kaupa (“to purchase”); also borrowed as Finnish kauppa (“shop, trade”), Russian купить (kupitʹ, “to purchase”), Old Church Slavonic коупити (kupiti, “to purchase”), Bulgarian ку́пя (kúpja, “to purchase”), Serbo-Croatian купити (“to purchase”), Czech koupit (“to purchase”), Polish kupić (“to purchase”).
- Low or reduced in price.
“Where there are many sellers and few purchases, land will be cheap.”
“One saint's day in mid-term a certain newly appointed suffragan-bishop came to the school chapel, and there preached on “The Inner Life.” He at once secured attention by his informal method, and when ”
“Datacasting bypasses the wired, terrestrial Internet and is a cheaper way to distribute software than pressing and mailing CDs.”
- Of poor quality.
- Of little worth.
“You grow cheap in every subject's eye.”
- slangUnderhanded or unfair.
“the cheap trick of hiding deadly lava under pushable blocks”
- Trading at a price level which is low relative to historical trends, a similar asset, or (for derivatives) a theoretical value.
“The ETF is trading cheap to NAV right now; we can arb this by buying the ETF and selling the underlying constituents.”
- Taking little of system time or resources.
“the algorithm is cheap to compute”
- countable, obsolete, uncountableTrade; traffic; chaffer; chaffering.
- countable, obsolete, uncountableA market; marketplace.
- countable, obsolete, uncountablePrice.
- countable, obsolete, uncountableA low price; a bargain.
“The sack that thou hast drunk me would have bought me lights as good cheap at the dearest chandler's in Europe.”
- countable, obsolete, uncountableCheapness; lowness of price; abundance of supply.
- intransitive, obsoleteTo trade; traffic; bargain; chaffer; ask the price of goods; cheapen goods.
- obsolete, transitiveTo bargain for; chaffer for; ask the price of; offer a price for; cheapen.
- obsolete, transitiveTo buy; purchase.
- obsolete, transitiveTo sell.
- obsoleteCheaply.
“I bought this cheap in a junk shop.”
“The pet shop has some budgerigars going cheap.”
“March 24 1658, John Milton, letter to Emeric Bigot
I need not request you to purchase them as cheap as possible”
Formscheaper(comparative) · cheapest(superlative) · chap(alternative, dialectal) · chop(alternative, dialectal) · ch3ap(alternative) · cheaps(plural) · cheaps(present, singular, third-person) · cheaping(participle, present) · cheaped(participle, past) · cheaped(past) · more cheap(comparative) · most cheap(superlative)