Payroll
noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A list of employees who receive salary or wages, together with the amounts due to each.
"Magazines kept aristocrats on the payroll to facilitate access to jet-set playgrounds like Corfu and Mustique."
- 2 the department that determines the amounts of wage or salary due to each employee wordnet
- 3 The total sum of money paid to employees.
- 4 a list of employees and their salaries wordnet
- 5 The calculation of salaries and wages and the deduction of taxes etc.; the department in a company responsible for this.
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- 6 the total amount of money paid in wages wordnet
- 7 Bribes paid to people. euphemistic
"I know that the deal started with the boys in Santiago, because they’ve been on the d’Anconia pay roll for centuries — well, no, ‘pay roll’ is an honorable word, it would be more exact to say that d’Anconia Copper has been paying them protection money for centuries — isn't that what your gangsters call it?"
- 1 To place on a payroll (noun sense 1). transitive
"Grantees may elect to payroll the enrollees through their own payroll system if the payroll system is consistent with regulations contained herein."
Example
More examples"How many people are there on the payroll?"
Etymology
From pay + roll.
Related phrases
More for "payroll"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.