tax

• enPR: tăks, IPA^(key): /tæks/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Homophone: tacks
• Rhymes: -æks

From Middle English taxe, from Anglo-Norman tax and Old French taxe, from Medieval Latin taxa.

tax (countable and uncountable, plural taxes)

1. Money paid to the government other than for transaction-specific goods and services.
   • 2013 May 17, George Monbiot, “Money just makes the rich suffer”, in The Guardian Weekly‎, volume 188, number 23, page 19:

     In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. […]  Essential public services are cut so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of inequality are almost fetishised.

2. A burdensome demand.

   a heavy tax on time or health

3. A task exacted from one who is under control; a contribution or service, the rendering of which is imposed upon a subject.
4. (obsolete) charge; censure

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Clarendon to this entry?)

5. (obsolete) A lesson to be learned.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Johnson to this entry?)

• (money paid to government): impost, tribute, contribution, duty, toll, rate, assessment. exaction, custom, demand, levy

• (money paid to government): subsidy

From Middle English taxen, from Anglo-Norman taxer (“to impose a tax”), from Latin taxāre, present active infinitive of taxō (“I handle”, “I censure”, “I appraise”, “I compute”).

tax (third-person singular simple present taxes, present participle taxing, simple past and past participle taxed)

1. (transitive) To impose and collect a tax from (a person or company).

   Some think to tax the wealthy is the fairest.

2. (transitive) To impose and collect a tax on (something).

   Some think to tax wealth is destructive of a private sector.

3. (transitive) To make excessive demands on.
   • Do not tax my patience.
   • 2007, January 16, “IBM”, in IBM - Reinventing the invention system - United States‎:

     But patent applications are increasingly accompanied by volumes and volumes of data on DVD, which taxes the resources of the patent office.

4. (transitive) To accuse.
5. (transitive) To examine accounts in order to allow or disallow items.

• taxable
• taxation

• ATX, xat

• tuxtax

tax

1. an onomatopoeia expressing the sound of blows, whack, crack
   • c. 197 BCE, Plautus, Persa :

     Tax tax- tergo meo erit. Non curo.

     My back will get whack, whack. I don't care.

• tax in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• tax in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire Illustré Latin-Français, Hachette
• tax in Harry Thurston Peck, editor (1898) Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York: Harper & Brothers

• Homophone: tacks

tax c

1. a dachshund (dog breed)