pawnbroker's shop
- noun
- /ˈpɔnˌbroʊkərz ʃɑp/
:
casa de empeño
- Due to financial difficulties, he had to visit the pawnbroker's shop to secure a loan.
Examples
-
I went to the pawnbroker's shop to exchange my old guitar for some cash.
-
She found a beautiful watch at the pawnbroker's shop that had been left as collateral.
-
"There is in the pawnbroker's shop a profound and illicit sadness, a concentrated dose of private failure.
Fiction book (1992)
Synonyms
28
3.0
A shop where people leave valuable things to get a loan or sell them for cash
A shop that lends money if you leave something you own as a promise to pay
A shop that gives money when people leave things until they pay it back
A shop that buys used items or lends money and keeps items until you pay back
Surface Forms
Morphology
pawnbroker's + shop
The meaning is directly compositional: 'pawnbroker's' (the person who lends money against pledged goods) + 'shop' yields 'a shop run by a pawnbroker'. The possessive noun + shop construction is a standard, cross-linguistic pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Pawnbroker's shop comes from the old practice of leaving a valuable item in a shop to get quick cash: the pawn is the item left and the broker is the person who keeps it. That's why the phrase means 'a shop where you can get a loan by leaving something as security'.