allowance
English
Alternative forms
- allowaunce (obsolete)
Etymology
Borrowed from Old French alouance.
Pronunciation
audio (US) (file) - IPA(key): /əˈlaʊəns/
Noun
allowance (countable and uncountable, plural allowances)
- permission; granting, conceding, or admitting
- 1613, William Shakespeare; [John Fletcher], “The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358, [Act III, scene ii]:
- you sent a large commission to Gregory de Cassado, to conclude, without the King's will or the state's allowance
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- Acknowledgment.
- The censure of the which one must in your allowance overweigh a whole theater of others. --William Shakespeare
- That which is allowed; a share or portion allotted or granted; a sum granted as a reimbursement, a bounty, or as appropriate for any purpose; a stated quantity
- her meagre allowance of food or drink
- I can give the boy a handsome allowance. -- William Makepeace Thackeray.
- Abatement; deduction; the taking into account of mitigating circumstances
- to make allowance for his naivety
- After making the largest allowance for fraud. -- Thomas Babington Macaulay.
- (commerce) A customary deduction from the gross weight of goods, different in different countries
- A child's allowance; pocket money.
- She gives her daughters each an allowance of thirty dollars a month.
- (minting) A permissible deviation in the fineness and weight of coins, owing to the difficulty in securing exact conformity to the standard prescribed by law.
- (obsolete) approval; approbation
- (Can we find and add a quotation of Crabbe to this entry?)
- (obsolete) license; indulgence
- (Can we find and add a quotation of John Locke to this entry?)
Synonyms
- (act of allowing): authorization, permission, sanction, tolerance.
- (money): stipend
- (minting): remedy, tolerance
Translations
the act of allowing, granting, conceding, or admitting; authorization; permission; sanction; tolerance
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acknowledgment
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that which is allowed
abatement; deduction; the taking into account of mitigating circumstances
a customary deduction from the gross weight of goods
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a child's allowance; pocket money — see pocket money
- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.
Translations to be checked
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Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for allowance in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)
Verb
allowance (third-person singular simple present allowances, present participle allowancing, simple past and past participle allowanced)
- (transitive) To put upon a fixed allowance (especially of provisions and drink).
- The captain was obliged to allowance his crew.
- (transitive) To supply in a fixed and limited quantity.
- Our provisions were allowanced.
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