Other forms: discounted, discounts, discounting
A discount is money off the price. Twenty percent off a coat in the sale, a student discount on a train ticket, the loyalty card that takes a pound off your coffee every tenth visit.
The noun takes ON: a discount on the full fare, and things sell at a discount. The verb is spelled the same but stressed differently — DIScount the noun, disCOUNT the verb — and it does two jobs. Shops discount stock at the end of a season, and people discount an idea, meaning they push it aside as not worth taking seriously. That second sense catches learners out: to say we cannot discount the possibility of rain is to say we cannot rule it out. As an adjective it labels the cheap end of a market — a discount airline, a discount store.
1noundiscountAn amount taken off the usual price.~91%
“Members get a ten percent discount on every booking.”
synonyms: reduction
2verbsellTo sell something for less than the usual price.~7%
“The shop discounted everything by half after Christmas.”
3verbtreatTo treat something as unlikely or unimportant, and set it aside.~2%
“The police have not discounted the possibility of a second driver.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
discount is a reduction in price.
Also accepted in games: reduction
Discount is counting taken away. Latin computo, to reckon or count, picked up dis-, meaning away, to make Medieval Latin discomputo, to deduct, and French descompte carried it into English. The sum is done, and then something is struck off the end of it.
Latin
dis- — away
Medieval Latin
discomputō — to deduct, discount
Old French
disconter
French
descompte
English, today
discount
Built from
Alteration of French descompte, décompte, from Old French disconter, desconter (“reckon off, account back, discount”), from Medieval Latin discomputō (“to deduct, discount”), from Latin dis- (“away”) + computō (“to reckon, count”). by surface analysis, dis- + count.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA