pay to play
pay to play verb: to incur a cost to participate in an activity; especially, in a corrupt way.
Verb
pay to play (third-person singular simple present pays to play, present participle paying to play, simple past and past participle paid to play)
- To incur a cost to participate in an activity; especially, in a corrupt way.
- Whether or not the father of our country was prone to campaign overkill [referring to a quoted passage about George Washington handing out rum, wine, beer, and cider for electioneering efforts], the above points up the fact that running for public office has long required the expenditure of...1986, United States Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, The Transformation in American Politics: Implications for Federalism, United States Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental...
- To make a campaign contribution or illegal payment to avail oneself of business or other opportunities controlled by politicians or civil servants.
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see pay, to, play.
Noun
pay to play (uncountable)
- Any kind of charge to engage in an activity.
- Campaign contributions (or outright bribes or graft) required to avail oneself of certain opportunities controlled by politicians, such as uncompetitive government contracts.
Forms of pay to play
| third-person singular present | pays to play |
|---|---|
| present participle | paying to play |
| past participle | paid to play |
| past | paid to play |
| alternative attributive especially noun | pay-to-play |
Origin of pay to play
From the sometime practice of charging a fee for admission to a gambling game.
Questions about pay to play
- What does pay to play mean?
- Pay to play means to incur a cost to participate in an activity; especially, in a corrupt way.
- What part of speech is pay to play?
- Pay to play can be a verb or a noun.
- What is the past tense of pay to play?
- The past tense of pay to play is paid to play.
Words near pay to play in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pay to play (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: “pay to play.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pay_to_play. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.