Other forms: subscriptions
A subscription is money you hand over again and again — every month, every year — to keep something coming. The magazine through the door, the streaming account, the gym you have been to twice.
You take out a subscription, you renew it, and one day you cancel it. Things come on subscription, and the newer phrase is subscription-only. The word is far older than the internet: to subscribe was to sign your name at the foot of a page, and a hall or a lifeboat could be paid for by public subscription, everybody writing down what they would give. That older sense survives in I do not subscribe to that view, which means I do not agree with it. Watch the preposition — a subscription to a paper, never of.
1nounsubscriptionA regular payment that keeps a service, a paper or a magazine coming to you.~96%
“The subscription costs nine pounds a month.”
synonyms: membership
2nounarrangementAn arrangement to receive something regularly, paid for or not.~2%
“Cancel a few email subscriptions and the inbox halves.”
3nounmoneyMoney promised to a fund by a group of people together.~2%
“The hall was built by public subscription.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
sub-SCRIP-tion → a RIP
A magazine lands on the mat on the first morning of every month. You pick it up and rip the plastic off it, and there is another one behind it next month, and the month after that.
hooks ontorip
Latin subscriptiō is a writing underneath: sub, under, plus scrībō, to write — the same scrībō that gives describe and prescription. Every sense of the word still turns on that picture, your name written at the bottom of a promise to show you agree to it. English had a home-made word for the identical act, and still does: underwrite.
Latin
subscriptiō
English, today
subscription
From Latin subscriptiō; by surface analysis, sub- + script + -ion. All senses reflect (either literally or figuratively) the notion of signing one's own name beneath some promise or description to indicate that one agrees with it or agrees to it.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA