Other forms: spent, spending, spends
To spend is to use money to buy things, or to use time on something. Spend money, spend a fortune, spend the day reading.
The past tense is spent. Spend on for money and spend doing for time: spent four hours writing it. As a noun, in business, the spend is the total amount spent: the marketing spend. Spent as an adjective means used up or exhausted. Note spending, spender, and overspend; and that spend a penny is a British euphemism for going to the lavatory, from coin-operated public toilets.
1verbspendTo use money to buy things.~42%
“How much money did you spend on your new shoes?”
2verbtimeTo use time on something.~58%
“I like to spend my weekends with my family.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
spend is a using up.
Old English spendan comes from Latin expendere, to weigh out — the same verb as expend and pendant, from pendere, to hang or weigh. Money was weighed before it was counted, and the word remembers it.
Middle English
spenden
English, today
spend
Built from
From Middle English spenden. From Middle English spenden, from Old English spendan (attested especially in compounds āspendan (“to spend”), forspendan (“to use up, consume”)), from Proto-West Germanic spendōn (“to spend”), borrowed from Latin expendere (“to weigh out”). a doublet of expend. Cognate with Old High German spentōn (“to consume, use, spend”) (whence German spenden (“to donate, provide”)), Middle Dutch - spenden (“to spend, dedicate”), Old Icelandic spenna (“to spend”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA