Cheap means costing little money. It can also mean low in quality or mean and ungenerous, depending on how it’s used.
“Cheap” comes from Old English “ceap,” meaning “trade” or “bargain,” related to buying and selling. Over time, the sense shifted from the act of bargaining to the idea of something costing little.
Originally, “cheap” was about bargaining, not low quality—“good cheap” once meant a good deal. That history is still hiding in place names like Cheapside in London, which was a market street. English quietly turned a word for “market” into a word for “this didn’t cost much.”
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