Word.ws English Dictionary

cheap out

cheap out verb: to reduce costs on a project or product to an unreasonable degree; to cut corners.

Verb

cheap out (third-person singular simple present cheaps out, present participle cheaping out, simple past and past participle cheaped out)

  1. (informal, intransitive) To reduce costs on a project or product to an unreasonable degree; to cut corners.
    • That's not the kind of product you want to cheap out on.
  2. (informal, intransitive) To act cheap; to unreasonably refuse to spend money.
    • I could never marry someone who cheaps out like that.
  3. (informal, intransitive) To be too stingy to achieve a purpose or provide a promised product/service/project.
    • I was cheaped out of having a good vacation because the hotel's marketing misled me.

Forms of cheap out

third-person singular presentcheaps out
present participlecheaping out
past participlecheaped out
pastcheaped out
alternative formcheapen out

Questions about cheap out

What does cheap out mean?
Cheap out means to reduce costs on a project or product to an unreasonable degree; to cut corners.
What part of speech is cheap out?
Cheap out is a verb.
What is the past tense of cheap out?
The past tense of cheap out is cheaped out.

Words near cheap out in the dictionary

  1. cheap fake
  2. cheap fakes
  3. cheap John
  4. cheap Johns
  5. cheap like borscht
  6. cheap out
  7. cheap seats
  8. cheap shot
  9. cheap shots
  10. cheap skate
  11. cheap skates

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cheap out (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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