Word.ws English Dictionary

incent

Syllables: in·cent/ɪnˈsɛnt/

incent verb: to provide an incentive to (a person or organization).

Verb

incent (third-person singular simple present incents, present participle incenting, simple past and past participle incented)

  1. (US, transitive) To provide an incentive to (a person or organization).
    • We need to incent people to innovate more.
    • We try to incent people to do it earlier, which levels the load.2007 February 24, Damon Darlin, “At Intuit, What Comes After Taxes?”, in New York Times
  2. (US, transitive) To provide an incentive for (something).
    • We need to incent more innovation.
    • DUNCAN: The more we can reward excellence, the more we can incent excellence, the more we can get our best teachers to work in those hard to staff schools2009 January 13, Arne Duncan, “Duncan Lays Out Positions in Confirmation Hearing”, in WBEZ Chicago Public Radio

Examples of incent in a sentence

  • HUD programs to incent owners to maintain affordable housing units have preserved over 3,500 projects with about 300,000 units.2009 July 15, Shelley Moore Capito, Legislative Options for Preserving Federally- and State-assisted Affordable Housing and Preventing...
  • incent investors to manage assets with a long-term perspective2010 June 24, Al Gore, David Blood, “Toward Sustainable Capitalism”, in Wall Street Journal:

Forms of incent

third-person singular presentincents
present participleincenting
past participleincented
pastincented

Origin of incent

Back-formation from incentive. Clipping of incentivize

Words that rhyme with incent

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about incent

What does incent mean?
Incent means to provide an incentive to (a person or organization).
How do you use incent in a sentence?
HUD programs to incent owners to maintain affordable housing units have preserved over 3,500 projects with about 300,000 units.
What part of speech is incent?
Incent is a verb.
How do you pronounce incent?
Incent is pronounced /ɪnˈsɛnt/.
What is the past tense of incent?
The past tense of incent is incented.

Words near incent in the dictionary

  1. incensors
  2. incensory
  3. incenst
  4. incensurable
  5. incensy
  6. incent
  7. incented
  8. incenter
  9. incenters
  10. incentified
  11. incentifies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: incent (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “incent.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/incent. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.