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Glite Dictionary
job lot

job lot

5.7
A group of different items sold together at a low price
  • noun
  • UK
translation icon : 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

job lot
  • UK
5.7
set
∞ 2.1
bundle
85 2.3
single piece
11 3.3

Surface Forms

job lot singular
job lots plural

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'.