wages

1. 1
   nounplural

   A person's total income earned over a given period of time.

   After taxes, her annual wages came to about forty thousand dollars.

   Their combined wages were finally enough to buy a small house.

   Similarearnings, income, pay, salary

   Note

   Here the plural is the only form. The word names one sum earned over a stretch of time, so there is no singular to count. It pairs readily with words of period or condition, such as weekly wages, back wages and minimum wages, and with verbs of bargaining, as when workers demand higher wages. For the simple plural of a single payment, see the ordinary plural.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of wage.

   The factory raised its wages after the strike ended.

   Rising wages helped lift the town out of poverty.

   Note

   A plural that does not always behave like one. The King James Bible renders Romans 6:23 as "the wages of sin is death," treating wages as a single reckoning, and that singular verb survives in fixed, elevated phrasing. In ordinary prose the plural verb is the safe choice: the wages are low. The same spelling also serves as the verb form of wage, as in waging war.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of wage.

   The general wages war with ruthless efficiency.

   The senator wages a long campaign for housing reform.

   Note

   In living use the present-tense verb takes a contest as its object: a war, a campaign, a struggle carried on over time. Older meanings were to bet, to hazard oneself, or to hire someone for pay. These are all obsolete, so a modern reader should not take a sentence like he wages his fortune as a wager. In current English it simply sounds wrong.

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