job lot
- noun
- UK
:
lote
- The store offered a job lot of toys for a fraction of the original price.
Examples
-
He found a job lot of gardening tools online and decided to buy them for his new home.
-
You could buy Chicago cops by the job lot back then, so it was no big deal arranging the details.
Fiction book (1990) -
It was part of a job lot.
Fiction book (1992) -
He purchased a job lot of postcards at a Rwandan post office showing typical wildlife scenes and the tourist slogan "Discover a thousand marvels in the land of a thousand hills."
Academic text (2005) -
She bought a job lot of old furniture at the auction and plans to refurbish it.
How Large
Surface Forms
Morphology
job + lot
The element 'lot' (a set or grouping) gives a clear clue that this is about a group of items, but 'job' (usually 'work' or 'task' to a B1 learner) does not transparently add the sense of a miscellaneous consignment offered for sale. The phrase is a lexicalized, regionally common collocation (especially in British English) whose specific commercial sense is not fully predictable from the constituents, so learners who only know the single-word meanings may only partially infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
The noun job lot may come from older uses of job meaning a small piece of work and lot meaning a group. When a seller put the things left from one small job together and sold them as one, people called it a job lot, so today it means 'a collection of mixed items sold together'.