wage

(wāj)

1. A regular payment, usually on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis, made by an employer to an employee, especially for manual or unskilled work.

2. wages The price of labor in an economy.

3. often wages(used with a sing. or pl. verb) A fitting return; a recompense: the wages of sin.

tr.v. waged, wag·ing, wag·es

To engage in (a war or campaign, for example).

[Middle English, from Old North French, of Germanic origin.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

salary

– wages

Salary and wages are both used to refer to the money paid to someone regularly for the work they do.

1. 'salary'

Professional people such as teachers are usually paid a salary. Their salary is the total amount of money that they are paid each year, although this is paid in twelve parts, one each month.

She earns a high salary as an accountant.

My salary is paid into my bank account at the end of the month.

2. 'wages'

If someone gets money each week for the work they do, you refer to this money as their wages.

On Friday afternoon the men are paid their wages.

He was working shifts at the factory and earning good wages.

3. 'wage'

You can refer in a general way to the amount that someone earns as a wage.

It is hard to bring up children on a low wage.

The government introduced a legal minimum wage.

You can also talk about someone's hourly, weekly, or monthly wage to mean the money that they earn each hour, week, or month.

Her hourly wage had gone up from £5.10 to £5.70.

The suit cost £40, more than twice the average weekly wage at that time.

Collins COBUILD English Usage © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 2004, 2011, 2012

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

wages - a recompense for worthy acts or retribution for wrongdoing; "the wages of sin is death"; "virtue is its own reward"

reward, payoff

aftermath, consequence - the outcome of an event especially as relative to an individual

Translations

Verdienst

salaire

wages

pl → Lohn m; the wages of sin → die gerechte Strafe, der Sünde Lohn (old)

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

Look here, Sancho, I would readily fix thy wages if I had ever found any instance in the histories of the knights-errant to show or indicate, by the slightest hint, what their squires used to get monthly or yearly; but I have read all or the best part of their histories, and I cannot remember reading of any knight-errant having assigned fixed wages to his squire; I only know that they all served on reward, and that when they least expected it, if good luck attended their masters, they found themselves recompensed with an island or something equivalent to it, or at the least they were left with a title and lordship.

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If I had been the most scrupulous man in the world, I must still have received my wages, for the very necessary purpose of not appearing to distinguish myself invidiously from my fellow-workmen.

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No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer,so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord,the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

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By the milliner, she was paid merely as a common sewing-girl, though her neatness, skill and taste might well have entitled her to double wages. A franc a day was the usual price for girls of an inferior caste, and out of this they were expected to find their own lodgings and food.

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Ninety pounds a year are good wages, and I expect to have the full value of my money out of you; remember, too, that things are on a practical footing in my establishment--business-like habits, feelings, and ideas, suit me best.

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Not counting premiums, their wages are thirty dollars a year."

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Then the field laborers who were left began to demand larger wages. Many of these laborers were little more than slaves, and their masters refused to pay them better.

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He saw that Metrov, like other people, in spite of his own article, in which he had attacked the current theory of political economy, looked at the position of the Russian peasant simply from the point of view of capital, wages, and rent.

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Billy's wages were cut, along with the wages of all the teamsters in Oakland.

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The old scale had dealt with the wages of the skilled men only; and of the members of the Meat Workers' Union about two-thirds were unskilled men.

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Capital takes fifty dollars as its share, and labor gets in wages fifty dollars as its share.

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A thing which natur- ally interested me, as a statesman, was the matter of wages. I picked up what I could under that head during the afternoon.

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