to pay off
28
3.6
- phrasal verb
- /peɪ ɔf/
:
pagar
- As soon as that was paid off, we'd head east to the mountains.
And not to make it about money, but got paid off of all of that, right.
- And not to make it about money, but got paid off of all of that, right.
- A part of the way black soldiers got into the war was as replacements for white men, and they had to pay off those white men with their wages.
- And I've said we shouldn't reward bad behavior, but sometimes we do pay off those that have these aggressive tendencies.
Examples
-
Has the ambassador paid you off?
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And now we get paid off in confederate bonds.
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I'd like to pay off the men.
-
Once there, she paid off the driver and rented a land car.
Fiction book (1991) -
For one, he had tried to pay off the victim not to testify against him.
Blog text (30) -
But we were paying Noriega off for some things that we were doing.
-
He's paying off all the men.
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Mom paid off the school and now the gymnasium is named after us.
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He paid off the mafia and he wants to put you under an exclusive deal.
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To show her appreciation, she decided to pay off the contractor for his hard work on the renovations.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
To give money for something you buy or owe
328
1.3
To give something to someone to thank them for doing something good
102
4.2
To give money to someone for loss, injury or unpaid work
89
2.7
To give something in return for help or kindness
3
9.9
To give something in return for someone's kindness or help
1
8.2
To pay someone for their work or services
Antonyms
How Generous
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense 'to take revenge' cannot be straightforwardly derived from 'pay' (transfer money) combined with 'off' (here noted as a slang verb 'to murder' or otherwise a particle). The relation is idiomatic and relies on pragmatic or slang usage rather than regular compositional rules, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents would unlikely infer this meaning.
Etymology
Pay off comes from the simple idea of giving money as payment for work: you pay someone off to finish the job or reward them, so it means 'to give someone money or another reward'.