Other forms: cheaper, cheapest
Cheap means costing little money. A cheap ticket, cheap food, cheaper than I expected.
It carries a hint of poor quality that inexpensive does not, which is why shops advertise things as affordable or good value rather than cheap. Applied to a person, cheap means unwilling to spend and is an insult; applied to a remark, a cheap shot is one that is easy and unfair. Note cheap and cheerful, which is British and affectionate — inexpensive and perfectly good — and cheap at the price, meaning worth more than it cost.
1adjectivecheapCosting little money.
“The flights were cheap because nobody wants to fly at six.”
synonyms: inexpensive, low-cost
2adjectivepoorOf poor quality because it cost little.
“The chairs were cheap and did not last a year.”
3adjectiveunfairUnfair and easy, said of a remark.
“That was a cheap thing to say and he knew it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
cheap is a level of price.
Also accepted in games: inexpensive
Old English ceap meant trade or a bargain, and it survives in place names: Cheapside and Chepstow were both markets. The adjective came from the phrase good cheap, meaning a good bargain, and English kept the second half and dropped the first.
Proto-West Germanic
*kaup
Old English
cēap — trade, market, value
Middle English
chep
English, today
cheap
Built from
As a noun, from Middle English chep, from Old English cēap (“trade, market, value”), from Proto-West Germanic kaup. As a verb, from Middle English chepen, from Old English ċēapian (“to buy, bargain, trade”), from Proto-West Germanic kaupōn, from Proto-Germanic kaupōną, a verbal derivative of kaupô (“trader”), from Latin caupō. The adjective originated as a shortening of Middle and Early Modern English good cheap, literally “good purchase” (as in “that was good cheap”, i.e. “that was [a] good purchase”). Compare goedkoop, bon marché. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA