Other forms: budgets, budgeted, budgeting
A budget is the money you have decided you are allowed to spend, worked out before you spend any of it. The household budget, a film's budget, the forty pounds set aside for the school trip.
Budget is a verb as well — you budget for a new boiler, you budget your time before an exam. As an adjective it means cheap and stripped back: a budget airline, a budget hotel, a budget phone. In Britain the Budget, with a capital B, is the government's yearly statement on tax and spending. The phrases to learn come in a set: on a budget, over budget, under budget, a tight budget. And keep the distinction clear, because it is the one people slip on — a budget is the plan, not the cash. You can have a generous budget and an empty account.
1nounbudgetThe amount of money set aside for something, and the plan for how it will be spent.~58%
“The film came in well over budget.”
synonyms: allowance
2verbparticularTo plan what you will spend, or to set money aside for a particular thing.~4%
“We budgeted for a new boiler this year.”
3adjectivelowCheap; sold at about the lowest price on the market.~2%
“They flew home on a budget airline.”
synonyms: low-cost, cheap
4nounmarketingThe government's yearly statement of what it will tax and what it will spend.~36%
“The Budget is announced in the spring.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 181 sentences found in the wild and placed 181 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
A budget began as a bag. Middle English bogett was a leather pouch, borrowed from Old French bougette, the little version of bouge, a leather bag or wallet, and behind that stands Latin bulga, a leather bag. The same bag is inside bulge, and further back the family runs to belly. Your budget is what you have in the purse.
Old French
bougette
Middle English
bogett
English, today
budget
Built from
From Middle English bogett, from Old French bougette, from fro + bouge. Recorded since 1432 as Middle English bogett, bouget, bowgette (“leather pouch”), borrowed from Old French bougette, the diminutive of bouge (“leather bag, wallet”) (also the root of bulge), itself from Latin bulga (“leather bag, bellow”), which derives from cel-gau bolgā (compare Old Irish bolg (“bag”), Breton bolc’h (“flax pod”)), a common root with the Germanic family (compare Dutch balg (“bellows”)), from the Proto-Indo-European bʰelǵʰ-. More at belly.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA