leverage

Etymology

lever + -age

noun

1. A force compounded by means of a lever rotating around a pivot; see torque.
   A crowbar uses leverage to pry nails out of wood.
   In order to proportion the braking force to the weight carried by a wheel - a matter of special importance in the braking of wagons - variable leverage systems are now being introduced in which the end of one axle spring is linked to a control spring in the change-over valve, so automatically varying the leverage exerted by the brake-rod according to whether the wagon is full or empty. 1960 April, “The braking of trains”, in Trains Illustrated, page 237
2. (by extension) Any influence which is compounded or used to gain an advantage.
   Try using competitors’ prices for leverage in the negotiation.
   The former Forest man, who passed a late fitness test, appeared to use Guy Moussi for leverage before nodding in David Fox's free-kick at the far post - his 22nd goal of the season. April 15, 2011, Saj Chowdhury, “Norwich 2 - 1 Nott'm Forest”, in BBC Sport
3. (finance) The use of borrowed funds with a contractually determined return to increase the ability to invest and earn an expected higher return, but usually at high risk.
   Leverage is great until something goes wrong with your investments and you still have to pay your debts.
   Online margin trading is usually based on leverage, where the brokerage effectively lets you borrow more money than you have deposited as collateral. 2011, Brian Dolan, Currency Trading For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, page 55
   Both exchanges offer crypto derivatives, which are bets on future fluctuations in cryptocurrency prices. They also offer extreme leverage — up to 125 times on Binance. That means a $1,000 down payment can be turned into a $125,000 gamble. 2021-07-23, Eric Lipton, Ephrat Livni, “‘I Feel Conflicted’: Crypto’s Offshore Trading Moguls Talk Shop”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
4. (finance) The debt-to-equity ratio.
   In such cases where there is a multiple capital structure the factor known as leverage comes into play. Jun 4, 1933, “Trusts Heartened by Security Rally”, in New York Times
5. (business) The ability to earn very high returns when operating at high-capacity utilization of a facility.
   Their variable-cost-reducing investments have dramatically increased their leverage.

verb

1. (transitive, chiefly US, slang, business) To use; to exploit; to manipulate in order to take full advantage (of something).
   They plan to leverage the publicity into a good distribution agreement.
   They plan to leverage off the publicity to get a good distribution agreement.
   EAP research has developed advanced methods for producing corpus-informed vocabulary resources, but these have yet to be fully leveraged to promote disciplinary literacy within the secondary school context. 2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, →DOI, page 105