allowance

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Borrowed from Old French alouance.

Pronunciation

  • audio (US)(file)
  • IPA(key): /əˈlaʊəns/

Noun

allowance (countable and uncountable, plural allowances)

  1. The act of allowing, granting, conceding, or admitting
  2. Acknowledgment.
    • The censure of the which one must in your allowance overweigh a whole theater of others. --William Shakespeare
  3. 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
  4. a limited quantity of meat and drink, when provisions fall short.
  5. Abatement; deduction; the taking into account of mitigating circumstances
    to make allowance for his naivety
  6. (commerce) A customary deduction from the gross weight of goods, different in different countries
    Tare and tret are examples of allowance.
  7. A child's allowance; pocket money.
    She gives her daughters each an allowance of thirty dollars a month.
  8. (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.
  9. (obsolete) approval; approbation
    (Can we find and add a quotation of Crabbe to this entry?)
  10. (obsolete) license; indulgence
    (Can we find and add a quotation of John Locke to this entry?)

Synonyms

Translations

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.

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 The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.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)

  1. To put upon a fixed allowance (especially of provisions and drink); to supply in a fixed and limited quantity.
    The captain was obliged to allowance his crew.
    Our provisions were allowanced.
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