cheap

Etymology

From Middle English cheep, chepe/chepen, chep, cheap/cheapien, chapien, from Old English cēap (“cattle, purchase, sale”), ċēapian (“to bargain, chaffer, trade”), from Proto-West Germanic *kaup (“trade, purchase”), *kaupōn (“to buy, trade”), from Proto-Germanic *kaupōną, *kaupijaną (“to buy, trade”), *kaupô (“inn-keeper, merchant”), from Latin caupō (“tradesman, innkeeper”). See also chapman. For sense evolution to "inexpensive," compare bargain or French bon marché. Cognates Cognate with Scots chepe (“to sell”), chape (“sale price”), North Frisian keap (“purchase”), West Frisian keap (“purchase, buy, acquisition”), Dutch koop (“buy, purchase, deal”), kopen (“to buy, purchase, shop”), Low German kopen (“to buy”), German Kauf (“trade, traffic, bargain, purchase, buy”), kaufen (“to buy”), Swedish köp (“bargain, purchase”), köpa (“to buy, purchase”), Norwegian Nynorsk kjøpa (“to buy, purchase”), Icelandic kaup (“purchase, bargain”), kaupa (“to purchase”); also borrowed as Finnish kauppa (“shop, trade”), Russian купить (kupitʹ, “to purchase”), Old Church Slavonic коупити (kupiti, “to purchase”), Bulgarian ку́пя (kúpja, “to purchase”), Serbo-Croatian купити (“to purchase”), Czech koupit (“to purchase”), Polish kupić (“to purchase”).

noun

1. (obsolete) Trade; traffic; chaffer; chaffering.
2. (obsolete) A market; marketplace.
3. Price.
4. (obsolete) A low price; a bargain.
5. Cheapness; lowness of price; abundance of supply.
   The cheap of this book is incredible.

adj

1. Low and/or reduced in price.
   [Rural solar plant] schemes are of little help to industry or other heavy users of electricity. Nor is solar power yet as cheap as the grid. For all that, the rapid arrival of electric light to Indian villages is long overdue. When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages. 2013-07-20, “Out of the gloom”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845
2. Of poor quality.
3. Of little worth.
4. (slang, of an action or tactic in a game of skill) Underhand or unfair.
   the cheap trick of hiding deadly lava under pushable blocks
5. (informal, chiefly derogatory) Stingy; mean; excessively frugal.
   Insurance is expensive, but don't be so cheap that you risk losing your home because of a fire.
6. (finance) Trading at a price level which is low relative to historical trends, a similar asset, or (for derivatives) a theoretical value.
   The ETF is trading cheap to NAV right now; we can arb this by buying the ETF and selling the underlying constituents.
7. (computing) Taking little of system time or resources.
   the algorithm is cheap to compute

verb

1. (intransitive, obsolete) To trade; traffic; bargain; chaffer; ask the price of goods; cheapen goods.
2. (transitive, obsolete) To bargain for; chaffer for; ask the price of; offer a price for; cheapen.
3. (transitive, obsolete) To buy; purchase.
4. (transitive, obsolete) To sell.

adv

1. Cheaply.
   March 24 1658, John Milton, letter to Emeric Bigot I need not request you to purchase them as cheap as possible