owe
- 1To be obligated to give something back to someone, or to perform some action for them.
After she covered my rent, I owe her a huge favor.
They owed the contractor for months of work he had already finished.
Note
The obligation began as possession: Old English āgan meant "to own", from the same root as own and ought, and ought was once this verb's past tense. The sense takes two objects: you owe someone something, or you owe it to someone to act. The Life and Death of Iacke Straw (1593) puts it starkly: "we owe God a death."
- 2To be in debt; to have outstanding money that must be repaid.
Many graduates owe heavily by the time they finish school.
The company owed so much that bankruptcy seemed inevitable.
- 3To have something as a result of a particular cause or source, with that cause named after the word to.
Much as a river owes its force to the countless streams that feed it.
The author owes much of her style to the poets she read as a child.
We owe our modern understanding of genetics to decades of patient research.
Note
Here the debt is figurative. What is owed is credit, and whatever earns that credit follows the preposition to, as when a record owes its success to its guitar solos. Unlike the obligation sense, nothing is paid back. The construction simply names a cause, so the subject is usually the thing that benefited, not a person who owes a debt.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English owen, from Old English āgan ("to own"), going back through Proto-Germanic to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to possess, own." It is related to "own" and "ought," and cognate with Sanskrit īṣṭe ("to own, possess").