Word.ws English Dictionary

malus

/ˈmeɪ.ləs/

malus noun: the loss or return of performance-related compensation originally paid by an employer to an employee as a result of the discovery of a defect in the performance. Also the plural of malu.

Noun (1)

malus (plural maluses or mali)

  1. The loss or return of performance-related compensation originally paid by an employer to an employee as a result of the discovery of a defect in the performance.
    • When bank fired the loan originator, they recovered the last two years of her bonuses under the malus clause in her contract.
    • The existence of boni and mali for the different risks can be interpreted through the sign of estimated covariances.c. 1997, ASTIN Bulletin, page 48
  2. (rare) A penalty or negative thing.
    • The driver game has a game screen with less number of properties and representations (see Fig. 3(a)). […] If the user completes a level within the allocated time, then the user gets a bonus and will be advanced to another level[,] and if user is unable to complete a level, then a malus is provided...2016, Rosa Bottino, Johan Jeuring, Remco C. Veltkamp, Games and Learning Alliance: 5th International Conference, GALA 2016, Utrecht, The Netherlands, December 5–7, 2016, Proceedings, Springer, →ISBN...

Noun (2)

malus (plural maluses)

  1. A plant of the genus Malus (the apples).
    • It leads to a certain extent to an evergreen type Docynia which is distributed in the Himalayas and western China and whose magnificence of bloom I learned to know on my travels in Yunnan; it is distinct from genuine maluses.1922, Gardener’s Chronicle of America, volume 26, page 228, column 2
    • Malus ‘Dartmouth’ is a variety of M. pumila, the wild crab-apple, and is only one of the several maluses which offer a wider choice than the commonly planted ‘John Downie,’ lemoinei and eleyi.1959, Gardeners Chronicle & Gardening Illustrated, volume 145, page 65, column 2
    Synonyms:
    apple

Also used as

malus is also the plural of malu.

Examples of malus in a sentence

  • If the boni and mali do not depend on the frequency of claims, the average bonus-malus coefficient increases with the frequency.2000, Jean Pinquet, “Experience Rating through Heterogeneous Models”, in Georges Dionne, editor, Handbook of Insurance, Kluwer Academic...
  • Bidders with inferior quality, higher transport costs or additional switching costs receive a Malus which decreases their bid automatically to incorporate the disadvantages.2008, Henner Gimpel, Nicolas R. Jennings, Gregory E. Kersten, Axel Ockenfels, Christof Weinhardt, Negotiation, Auctions, and Market...
  • If both the estimated payment- and checking-rate is not above a threshold in a district, the contracted party will receive a malus for that district, and no bonus for any other district.2016, David Aveiro, Robert Pergl, Duarte Gouveia, Advances in Enterprise Engineering X: 6th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC...
  • In gardens which are rather open and exposed, the ornamental crabs or maluses are generally less satisfactory than the cherries as flowering trees.1968, Agriculture in Northern Ireland, volume 43, page 290:

Synonyms of malus

Forms of malus

pluralmaluses
pluralmali

Origin of malus

From Latin malus, by analogy with bonus (“additional compensation”). Doublet of mal.

From Latin mālus and translingual Malus.

Questions about malus

What does malus mean?
Malus means the loss or return of performance-related compensation originally paid by an employer to an employee as a result of the discovery of a defect in the performance.
How do you use malus in a sentence?
If the boni and mali do not depend on the frequency of claims, the average bonus-malus coefficient increases with the frequency.
What part of speech is malus?
Malus is a noun.
How do you pronounce malus?
Malus is pronounced /ˈmeɪ.ləs/.
What is the plural of malus?
The plural of malus is maluses.

Words near malus in the dictionary

  1. malunited
  2. Maluno Norte
  3. Maluno Sur
  4. malurid
  5. malurids
  6. malus
  7. malus genius
  8. maluses
  9. Maluso
  10. malva
  11. malva pudding

Source and license

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