compensation
Americannoun
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the act or state of compensating, as by rewarding someone for service or by making up for someone's loss, damage, or injury by giving the injured party an appropriate benefit.
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the state of being compensated or rewarded in this way.
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something given or received as an equivalent for services, debt, loss, injury, suffering, lack, etc.; indemnity.
The insurance company paid him $2000 as compensation for the loss of his car.
- Synonyms:
- indemnification, satisfaction, requital, reparation, amends, payment, recompense
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Biology. the improvement of any defect by the excessive development or action of another structure or organ of the same structure.
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Psychology. a mechanism by which an individual attempts to make up for some real or imagined deficiency of personality or behavior by developing or stressing another aspect of the personality or by substituting a different form of behavior.
noun
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the act or process of making amends for something
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something given as reparation for loss, injury, etc; indemnity
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the automatic movements made by the body to maintain balance
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the attempt to conceal or offset one's shortcomings by the exaggerated exhibition of qualities regarded as desirable
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biology abnormal growth and increase in size in one organ in response to the removal or inactivation of another
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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noncompensationnoun
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precompensationnoun
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subcompensationnoun
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compensationaladjective
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procompensationadjective
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subcompensationaladjective
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of compensation
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English compensacioun, from Latin compēnsātiōn-, stem of compēnsātiō “a balancing”; equivalent to compensate + -ion
Explanation
Compensation means "making up for something." When a restaurant offers you a free dessert as compensation for messing up your dinner order, the hope is that you will leave happy (and refrain from writing a negative review online). Compensation can also be money, a payment meant to give someone a fair exchange for their effort and output. In fact, the word comes from the Latin word compensat-, meaning "weighed against." If you receive fair compensation for your work, the money is equal to your time and effort. In other words, the scale is balanced.
Vocabulary lists containing compensation
The Bill of Rights
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"The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs
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"The Monkey's Paw," Vocabulary from the short story
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Its founders staged a sit-in in Delhi, demanding Pradhan's resignation, education reforms and compensation for the bereaved families.
From BBC ● Jul. 27, 2026
Reporters programmatically extracted compensation tables, footnotes and other explanations of perquisites mentioned in the filings and fed the results to an LLM which parsed the amount, type and beneficiary of each perk.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 25, 2026
The pandemic effectively put an end to that, and as workers demanded fair compensation, the cost of producing shows skyrocketed.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 24, 2026
Viktoria Terekhova, founder of a children's clothing brand, said in a video on Instagram that she had lost "practically all" her stock and had no way of obtaining compensation.
From Barron's ● Jul. 24, 2026
He insists there should have been complete compensation in the undamaged part of my cerebral cortex, and that my dragging right side is merely holding on to a habit it learned in infancy.
From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
But all the compensations, all the progress anyway.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 26, 2025
Edinburgh Employment Tribunal ruled that PC Jones should be awarded compensations of £24,800 and PC Tunnock should receive £23,824.
From BBC ● Sep. 2, 2025
Earlier in the day, Mohsin Naqvi, the top official in Punjab province, where Jaranwala is located, announced the compensations on X, previously known as Twitter.
From Washington Times ● Aug. 21, 2023
Once one of Citgo's U.S. parent companies, Citgo Holding, pays off its debt entirely later this year, the firm will have room to get new financing, an extra tool for negotiating some compensations, Medina added.
From Reuters ● May 31, 2023
The life of a soldier was.not without certain compensations.
From "A Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
