Word.ws English Dictionary

base rate

base rate noun: a benchmark interest rate, from which other interest rates are calculated; a policy rate.

Noun

base rate (plural base rates)

  1. A benchmark interest rate, from which other interest rates are calculated; a policy rate.
    • On loans to higher-risk customers, the bank charges 5% above the base rate.
    1. (UK) Especially, the interest rate at which the Bank of England lends money to commercial banks.
  2. The background rate of occurrence of any phenomenon, which informs any logical analysis of its rate of occurrence under any subset of circumstances; especially, the proportion of individuals in a population who have a certain characteristic (e.g., trait, experience, circumstance), irrespective of any treatment effects in a treatment group of a scientific study.

Forms of base rate

pluralbase rates

Questions about base rate

What does base rate mean?
Base rate means a benchmark interest rate, from which other interest rates are calculated; a policy rate.
What part of speech is base rate?
Base rate is a noun.
What is the plural of base rate?
The plural of base rate is base rates.

Words near base rate in the dictionary

  1. base points
  2. base price
  3. base prices
  4. base radio
  5. base radios
  6. base rate
  7. base rate fallacies
  8. base rate fallacy
  9. base rates
  10. base rent
  11. base right

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: base rate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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