Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act, manner, or amount of using; use.
  • noun The act or manner of treating; treatment.
  • noun Habitual or accepted practice.
  • noun A usual, habitual, or accepted practice.
  • noun The way in which words or phrases are actually used, spoken, or written in a speech community.
  • noun A particular expression in speech or writing.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Use; enjoyment.
  • noun The act of using.
  • noun Mode of using or treating; treatment.
  • noun Long-continued use or practice; customary way of acting; habitual use; custom; practice: as, the ancient usage of Parliament.
  • noun Established or customary mode of employing a particular word, phrase, or construction; current locution.
  • noun Manners; behavior; conduct.
  • noun Synonyms Habit, Manner, etc. See custom.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of using; mode of using or treating; treatment; conduct with respect to a person or a thing.
  • noun obsolete Manners; conduct; behavior.
  • noun Long-continued practice; customary mode of procedure; custom; habitual use; method.
  • noun Customary use or employment, as of a word or phrase in a particular sense or signification.
  • noun obsolete Experience.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The manner or the amount of using; use
  • noun Habit or accepted practice
  • noun lexicography The ways and contexts in which spoken and written words are used, determined by a lexicographer's intuition or from corpus analysis.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the act of using
  • noun accepted or habitual practice
  • noun the customary manner in which a language (or a form of a language) is spoken or written

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French, from us, from Latin ūsus, from past participle of ūtī, to use.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Anglo-Norman and Old French usage.

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Examples

  • The only way it at all bothers me in usage is when it is overused or redundant, as in, “These ONES are the shoes I want.”

    Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct « Motivated Grammar 2009

  • The most common complaint about the European model of train usage is that it is skewed towards passenger travel.

    Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » The Leftish Mindset, In One Sentence 2009

  • This one over here is a word usage filter: a sort of advanced search engine, with a whole host of search parameters.

    30 Days Of Night TIM LIBBON 2010

  • Consistency in usage is desirable but perfect consistency is very hard indeed to attain even for the most professional publishers.

    Those apostrophes 2006

  • Consistency in usage is desirable but perfect consistency is very hard indeed to attain even for the most professional publishers.

    Those apostrophes 2006

  • Consistency in usage is desirable but perfect consistency is very hard indeed to attain even for the most professional publishers.

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  • Words get reused in different disciplines and words become trendy and overused, but neither of these things makes a word usage incorrect or inappropriate.

    The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time William Safire 2004

  • Words get reused in different disciplines and words become trendy and overused, but neither of these things makes a word usage incorrect or inappropriate.

    The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time William Safire 2004

  • An in-class semantic (referring to the meaning of words) or verbal paraphasia is a word usage that, although imprecise, remains understandable because the approximate word or phrase relates to some characteristic of the precise word (e.g., its basic function or class).

    The Neuropsychiatric Guide to Modern Everyday Psychiatry Michael Alan Taylor 1993

  • The scientists ran linguistic crunches on the text of each email to infer how "new" its information was-judging newness by how unusual the word usage was compared with the recruiter's norm.

    Wired Top Stories Clive Thompson 2011

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