to put down a deposit
2
3.2
- phrasal verb
:
hacer un depósito
- He'd bought his way out of the condo, traded his half-paid-for Alfa for a car probably worth a negative sum, put down a deposit and a month's rent on the bungalow, and sent a check to the Red Cross lady on TV.
Examples
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I mean, I even put down a deposit on my boat.
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Just enough to put down a deposit.
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I put down a deposit for school, and now I risked losing everything.
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And I said, just make the commitment, you know, sign up, put down a deposit, and then just watch and you'll start seeing the ways for it to manifest and show up.
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I can't get a credit card unless I put down a deposit for the amount of credit I want—in other words, pay to borrow money from myself.
Blog text (20) -
To secure the apartment, I decided to put down a deposit before the landlord found another tenant.
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If you're serious about buying the car, you should put down a deposit this weekend.
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We need to put down a deposit on the venue to guarantee our wedding date.
Antonyms
How Much
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun 'deposit' clearly signals a sum paid as security, but the verb phrase 'put down' is a metaphorical/collocational extension of 'put' (place) to mean 'pay' and has several other senses. Because understanding the full phrase requires knowing this payment sense of 'put down' (a collocation with 'deposit'), it is partially but not fully predictable to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Put down a deposit comes from the simple image of actually placing money on a table, putting down a small deposit to hold something for you. So it means 'to make an initial payment' to 'reserve' or 'secure' an item or booking.