Other forms: charges, charged, charging
To charge is to ask for money. The garage charged him ninety pounds for a part worth twelve, the bank charges you for going overdrawn, and the little museum down by the river charges nothing at all to walk in and sit down.
The same six letters carry a full day's work. You charge a phone, filling the battery back up with power. The police charge somebody with an offence, which is the formal accusation that starts a court case. As a noun it is the price itself — free of charge, no charge for delivery — and it is also the electricity sitting in a battery. Whoever is in charge of something is responsible for it, and somebody who takes charge steps in and runs it. A bull charges a fence, and so does an army. Two prepositions to keep straight: you charge a person for a thing, and you charge a person with a crime.
1verbpriceTo ask a particular price for something.~17%
“They charge five pounds for delivery.”
2verbpowerTo put electricity into a battery.~2%
“Leave the phone charging overnight.”
3nounfeeThe price asked for something.~41%
“There is no charge for cancelling.”
synonyms: fee, cost
4verbaccuseTo accuse somebody formally of a crime.~40%
“He was charged with dangerous driving.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 46 of them on a sense (94 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin carricō meant to load, and it was built on carrus, a wagon — the same wagon that rolled into English as car. To charge a thing was to pile a load onto it, and every modern sense is still a load of some kind: the money loaded onto a bill, the power loaded into a battery, the accusation loaded onto a defendant. Cargo is the same word again, borrowed a second time by a different road.
Old French
chargier
Middle English
chargen
English, today
charge
From Middle English chargen, from Old French chargier. From Middle English chargen, from Old French chargier, from Latin carricō (“to load”), from Latin carrus (“a car, wagon”); see car. a doublet of cargo.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA