compensation
- 1Payment or other rewards given in return for work or services performed.
The board approved a generous compensation package for the new CEO.
Total compensation at the firm includes bonuses, stock options, and benefits.
Similarrestitution
- 2Something regarded as an equivalent, especially something given to make up for a loss.
Residents received compensation for the damage caused by the construction project.
She considered the extra vacation days fair compensation for months of overtime.
Similarrecompense, remuneration, amends
Note
The construction matters here. Henry Hallam in 1827 marks the person paid with to ("compensation to the dispossessed owners"), while the loss takes for. Burke's "pecuniary compensation" (1796) shows how an adjective can specify the form it takes. Amends leans toward putting a wrong right. Remuneration leans toward payment for work, which is closer to the reward for service.
- 3The act of making up for a loss or a service, or the principle that one thing should balance another.
The court favored compensation over punishment in resolving the dispute.
Modern labor law rests on the principle of compensation for work performed.
Similarrestitution
Note
Here the word names the balancing itself, not the thing handed over. Emerson's essay "Compensation" (1841) stretches it into a law of nature, calling all human labor "one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe." The word reached English as Middle English compensacioun, through Old French from Latin compensātiō, and in modern terms it is simply compensate + -ion. For the payment or thing given, see the equivalent itself.
- 4The canceling of debts between two parties who each owe the other, with each debt paid off by a credit of equal amount.
The accountants applied compensation to clear the mutual invoices between the two firms.
Compensation extinguished both loans, since each bank was creditor and debtor to the other.
Note
A bookkeeper's sense in which no money need change hands. When two parties owe each other, the debts are offset and both obligations are extinguished, the verb this sense keeps company with. Its synonym set-off is the clearer choice in writing, because compensation alone is easily read as making up for a loss. Here nothing is made good, only balanced out.
- 5The capacity of one part of the brain to increase its activity and take over the function of a damaged part, for example after a stroke.
Through compensation, undamaged regions of his brain gradually took over the language functions he had lost.
Compensation tends to be stronger in younger brains, which adapt more readily after injury.
Note
In neuroscience it names one route of recovery, a form of functional neuroplasticity. Intact regions increase their activity or recruit alternative circuits to do the work of damaged tissue, as after a stroke or traumatic brain injury. It is not repair of the damaged area. The loss remains, and other tissue covers for it, the same balancing that the general principle describes.
- 6A price adjustment provided for in real estate sale contracts, so that errors in the property's description are corrected by payment rather than by voiding the agreement.
The contract entitled the buyer to compensation when the lot proved half an acre short.
Both parties preferred compensation to the cost and delay of unwinding the sale.
Note
A conveyancer's term, and a protective one. Sale contracts customarily provide that a misdescription of the property will not void the sale. Instead, the error becomes "the subject of compensation", typically an abatement of the purchase price. A buyer whose lot proves smaller than described is entitled to compensation rather than to walk away.
- 7The relationship between the outdoor air temperature and the calculated target temperature of the air or water a building's heating system supplies, used to heat spaces efficiently.
The new controls use compensation to lower the flow temperature as the weather warms.
Engineers programmed a compensation curve into the building's control system.
Note
Heating engineers use it for a control strategy. As the outdoor air warms, the system lowers the temperature of the water or air it supplies, and it raises it as the weather cools. The relationship is plotted as a compensation curve and set on a device called a compensator. In practice the word usually appears in those compounds rather than alone.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English compensacioun, from Old French compensacion, from Latin compensātiōnem. It is equivalent to "compensate" plus the suffix "-ion".