petties
- 1Small or miscellaneous expenses, such as postage and telephone charges.
The shipping agent billed the owners for freight, insurance and petties.
Under the contract, the manager may charge postage, phone calls and other petties to the vessel's account.
Similarsundries, incidentals
Note
A bookkeeper's shortening of petty expenses, and always plural: one small cost is never a petty. It is the catch-all line for charges too minor to list one by one, set beside postage, telegrams and telephones in the shipping agreements and customs lists of the 1920s. Richard Dafforne in 1684 already recommends posting many petties into one sum.
- 2Plural of petty.
Note
A regular plural, with the y changing to -ies, for the older and regional nouns behind petty: small schoolboys and their beginners' class, and, as a polite dialect word, outdoor toilets. The adjective has no plural, and the bookkeeping word for small expenses shares this spelling, so the setting decides which is meant.
petties is a form of petty
petty, noun: A polite word for an outbuilding used as a toilet. Full entry
- Forms
- pettypetties plural
- Spelling
- petty → petties: change y to i, add -es
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
Use it in a sentence
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Origin
Formed from petty (adjective and noun) with -ies; the plural noun is a shortening of petty expenses.