Other forms: pensions, pensioned
A pension is the money that keeps arriving after you stop working. It lands every month, from the state or from an employer's scheme, and people plan decades around it.
It covers both the payment and the pot the payment comes from: you draw a pension, and you pay into a pension for forty years first. The state pension is what the government pays; a workplace or private pension is what you and your employer built up between you. As a verb it nearly always comes with off — the company pensioned him off at sixty — and it carries a hint of being quietly got rid of. The person is a pensioner, shortened in Britain to OAP, for old-age pensioner. One trap for travellers: in France and Italy a pension is also a small cheap guest house, said the French way, and that is a different thing altogether.
1nounpensionMoney paid regularly to someone who has retired.
“His pension arrives on the last Friday of the month.”
2nounschemeThe scheme or fund the money is paid into and later drawn from.
“She has been paying into a pension since she was twenty-three.”
3verbretireTo make someone retire and give them a pension.
“They pensioned him off a year before he wanted to go.”
4nounsmallA small cheap guest house in France or Italy, said the French way.
“We stayed in a pension two streets from the station.”
pension is a regular payment.
Pension came through Anglo-Norman and Old French from Latin pensio, a payment — and pensio was built on pendo, to weigh. Roman payments were weighed out, so a payment was literally a weighing. Latin used the word for rent and compensation as well; English narrowed it down to the one payment that arrives after the working years end.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)pend-
Latin
pēnsiō — payment, weight, rent, compensation
Old French
pencion
Anglo-Norman
pencione
Middle English
pencioun
English, today
pension
Built from
From Middle English pencioun, pensioun, from Anglo-Norman pencione, Old French pencion, and their source, Latin pēnsiō (“payment, weight, rent, compensation”), from the participle stem of pendō (“to weigh”). a doublet of pensione.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA