post exchange
- noun
- /poʊst ɪksˈtʃeɪndʒ/
- Jargon
:
tienda de la base
- The post exchange offers a variety of goods for military personnel and their families.
Examples
-
At the post exchange, soldiers can purchase everything from snacks to uniforms.
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- Post Exchange, let's start there.
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- Post Exchange near the bus depot, Sherman Surplus over on Santee.
-
A new officer arrived in the late fall, and the teenage boy appeared one day and asked the boy where the officer kept the new shortwave radio he had recently purchased in the post exchange, and the boy refused to tell him.
Fiction book (1992) -
The only source of contention between the camp commander and the prisoners was the lack of cigarettes in the small camp store, the post exchange (PX), for the nicotine-addicted prisoners, but at one point the commander worked to supply each man with his own pack to sustain him for a while.
Academic text (2008) -
He went to the post exchange to pick up supplies for his family.
Synonyms
18
8.1
A store on a military base where service members and their families buy goods without tax
7
7.0
A store on a military base that sells food and other supplies to people in the military
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning (a store located on a military post) is compositionally related to 'post' + 'exchange' — an 'exchange' situated on a 'post'. However, the military sense of 'post' (army base) and the specialized use of 'exchange' to mean a commissary/shop are somewhat jargonistic and not fully predictable for a B1 learner who only knows the general senses, so it is partially transparent.
Etymology
The phrase post exchange comes from army life: a post is a military base and an exchange was an old word for a shop where people trade or buy goods. Soldiers and their families would buy items at the base exchange, so today post exchange means 'the store on a military base'.