# owe

Pronunciation: say "OH" US /oʊ/, UK /əʊ/

## Verb

1. To be obligated to give something back to someone, or to perform some action for them.
   - Simple: To have to give something back to someone, or to do something for them because you should.
   - _After she covered my rent, I owe her a huge favor._
   - _They owed the contractor for months of work he had already finished._
2. To be in debt; to have outstanding money that must be repaid.
   - Simple: To have money that you must pay back to someone.
   - _Many graduates owe heavily by the time they finish school._
   - _The company owed so much that bankruptcy seemed inevitable._
3. To have something as a result of a particular cause or source, with that cause named after the word to.
   - Simple: To have something because of a person or thing that caused 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._

## 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").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/owe (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).