Word.ws English Dictionary

trades off

trades off is the third-person singular simple present indicative of trade off.

Meaning of trade off

Verb

trade off (third-person singular simple present trades off, present participle trading off, simple past and past participle traded off)

  1. (transitive) To choose (something) in exchange for something else, where having both at once is not an available option.
    • In the entry-level product category, the engineers had to trade off maximal durability for affordable upfront cost.
  2. (intransitive) To choose among options, where having them all at once is not an available option.
    • Part of being a competent engineer is knowing how to trade off appropriately among mutually exclusive options, depending on the specified requirements for each design.

Questions about trades off

What is trades off the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Trades off is the third-person singular simple present indicative of trade off.

Words near trades off in the dictionary

  1. trades
  2. trades away
  3. trades down
  4. trades hands
  5. trades in
  6. trades off
  7. trades paint
  8. trades places
  9. trades union
  10. trades unionist
  11. trades unionists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trades off (page history and authors); trade off (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: “trades off.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/trades_off. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.