Other forms: overtimes
Overtime is the hours you work after the normal day has ended. The shift finishes at six and you are still on the floor at nine; the factory runs two extra hours a night through the Christmas rush.
Overtime is paid at a higher rate - time and a half, or double time on a Sunday - which is why people volunteer for it and why managers count the hours so carefully. The word is uncountable: you do overtime, you work overtime, you put in six hours of overtime, and you never have an overtime. It also works as an adverb with no preposition at all: she worked overtime on Friday. In American sport, overtime is the extra period played when the score is level at the end of a game; British football calls that extra time. And when someone's imagination is working overtime, it is running much harder than it should.
1nounovertimeHours worked beyond your normal working day, or the extra pay you get for them.~39%
“He picked up four hours of overtime to cover the rent.”
synonyms: extra hours
2adverbbeyondBeyond your normal working hours.~5%
“They asked the whole team to work overtime until the audit was finished.”
3nounperiodAn extra period played when a game is level at the end of normal time.~56%
“The game went to overtime and was decided by a single free throw.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
overtime is extra working time.
Middle English
tyme
English
time
English, today
overtime
From over- + time. time comes from Middle English tyme. From Middle English tyme, time, from Old English tīma (“time, period, space of time, season, lifetime, fixed time, favorable time, opportunity”), from Proto-West Germanic tīmō, from Proto-Germanic tīmô (“time”), from Proto-Indo-European deh₂imō, from Proto-Indo-European deh₂y- (“to divide”). Related to tide. Not related to Latin tempus. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA