compensation

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The act of compensating or the state of being compensated.
2. n. Something, such as money, given or received as payment or reparation, as for a service or loss.
3. n. Biology The increase in size or activity of one part of an organism or organ that makes up for the loss or dysfunction of another.
4. n. Psychology Behavior that develops either consciously or unconsciously to offset a real or imagined deficiency, as in personality or physical ability.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The act of compensating; counterbalance: as, nature is based on a system of compensations.
2. n. That which is given or received as an equivalent, as for services, debt, want, loss, or suffering; indemnity; recompense; amends; requital.
3. n. That which supplies the place of something else, or makes good a deficiency, or makes amends: as, the speed of the hare is a compensation for its want of any weapon of defense.
4. n. In mech., means of creating a balance of forces; counteraction of opposing tendencies; adjustment for equilibrium. Compensation of the contraction and expansion of metals through variations of temperature is effected in the pendulums and balancewheels of timepieces chiefly by a combination of metals of different expansibilities, and in iron beams, rails, etc., by allowance for increase and diminution of length; of inequalities in magnetic attraction, etc., by devices called compensators. See compensation-balance, below, and compensator.
5. n. In the civil law, the extinguishment of a debt by a counter-claim which the debtor has against his creditor, thus effecting the simultaneous extinguishment of two obligations, or of one and part of another.
6. n. In pathology, an increase in functional power of some organ or part of an organ to make up for a defect in another organ or in another part of the same organ.
7. n. In psychophysics, the neutralization of a sensation by a stimulus process of a complementary or antagonistic kind.
8. n. In vegetable teratol., the occurrence of opposite abnormal conditions in different parts of the same plant, as an atrophied condition of one part associated with a hypertrophied condition of another.

Wiktionary

1. n. The act or principle of compensating.
2. n. That which constitutes, or is regarded as, an equivalent; that which makes good the lack or variation of something else; that which compensates for loss or privation; amends; remuneration; recompense.
3. n. The extinction of debts of which two persons are reciprocally debtors by the credits of which they are reciprocally creditors; the payment of a debt by a credit of equal amount; a set-off.
4. n. A recompense or reward for some loss or service.
5. n. An equivalent stipulated for in contracts for the sale of real estate, in which it is customary to provide that errors in description, etc, shall not avoid, but shall be the subject of compensation.
6. n. The relationship between air temperature outside a building and a calculated target temperature for provision of air or water to contained rooms or spaces for the purpose of efficient heating. In building control systems the compensation curve is defined to a compensator for this purpose.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The act or principle of compensating.
2. n. That which constitutes, or is regarded as, an equivalent; that which makes good the lack or variation of something else; that which compensates for loss or privation; amends; remuneration; recompense.
3. n. The extinction of debts of which two persons are reciprocally debtors by the credits of which they are reciprocally creditors; the payment of a debt by a credit of equal amount; a set-off.
4. n. A recompense or reward for some loss or service.
5. n. An equivalent stipulated for in contracts for the sale of real estate, in which it is customary to provide that errors in description, etc., shall not avoid, but shall be the subject of compensation.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. something (such as money) given or received as payment or reparation (as for a service or loss or injury)
2. n. (psychiatry) a defense mechanism that conceals your undesirable shortcomings by exaggerating desirable behaviors
3. n. the act of compensating for service or loss or injury