Word.ws English Dictionary

pay back

/peɪ bæk/

pay back verb: to pay (a debt or the lender) so as to provide the entire amount of money owed.

Verb

pay back (third-person singular simple present pays back, present participle paying back, simple past and past participle paid back)

  1. (transitive) To pay (a debt or the lender) so as to provide the entire amount of money owed.
    • Douglas: Roy, give me £20.
      Roy: What?
      Douglas: Give me £20. I'll pay you back.2008 November 21, Graham Linehan, The IT Crowd, Season 3, Episode 1
    • He paid her back with interest, giving her ₿3 and an NFT for the $6 he'd borrowed last week.
  2. (figuratively) To avenge, to exact revenge.
    • He paid her back with interest, avenging his father's murder with nine degrees of reprisal.

pay back meaning in Urdu, Kannada, Arabic and Vietnamese

pay back in Urdu

to pay back, recompense
اتارنا utārnā

pay back in Kannada

ತೀರಿಸು, ಬೀಟು

pay back in Arabic

to repay
جَازَى jāzā

pay back in Vietnamese

to repay
trả

Forms of pay back

third-person singular presentpays back
present participlepaying back
past participlepaid back
pastpaid back

Words formed from pay back

Questions about pay back

What does pay back mean?
Pay back means to pay (a debt or the lender) so as to provide the entire amount of money owed.
What is pay back in Urdu?
Pay back in Urdu is اتارنا (utārnā). See Pay back meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is pay back?
Pay back is a verb.
How do you pronounce pay back?
Pay back is pronounced /peɪ bæk/.
What is the past tense of pay back?
The past tense of pay back is paid back.

Words near pay back in the dictionary

  1. pay advice
  2. pay advices
  3. pay and display
  4. pay as you earn
  5. pay attention
  6. pay back
  7. pay back in someone's own coin
  8. pay by bank
  9. pay check
  10. pay checks
  11. pay cheque

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pay back (page history and authors); اتارنا (Urdu) (page history and authors); pay back (Kannada Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-pay back.wav.

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