tax
Definitions
General English
- noun money taken by the government from things such as people’s incomes and sales, to pay for government services
Accounting
- noun money taken by the government or by an official body to pay for government services
- noun an amount of money charged by government as part of a person’s income or on goods bought
Economics
- verb to take money from the income of an individual or company, or when a good or service is used or bought, to pay for government services
Law
- verb to have the costs of a legal action assessed by the court
- verb to assess the bill presented by a parliamentary agent
Politics
- verb to make someone pay a tax or to put a tax on something
Slang
- verb to mug or steal from someone, leaving them with a proportion of their money. A miscreants’ jargon term for partial robbery, recorded among street gangs in London and Liverpool since the late 1970s.
Origin & History of “tax”
Tax originally denoted ‘assess an amount to be levied’; the notion of ‘imposing such a levy’ is a secondary development. The word comes via Old French taxer from Latin taxāre ‘touch, assess, appraise’, a derivative of tangere ‘touch’ (source of English contact, tangible, etc). From taxāre was derived the medieval Latin noun taxa ‘tax, piece of work imposed’, which passed into English via Anglo-Norman tasque as task (13th c.).
