1 an amount of money that is given to sb regularly or for a particular purpose:
an allowance of $20 a day * a clothing / living / travel allowance * Do you get an allowance for clothing?
seealsoATTENDANCEALLOWANCE
2 the amount of sth that is allowed in a particular situation:
a baggage allowance of 20 kilos * Roman soldiers received a salt allowance, called salarium, the origin of the word salary.
3 (BrE) an amount of money that can be earned or received before you start paying tax:
personal tax allowances
4 (especially AmE) = POCKETMONEY
IDIOMS
make allowance(s) for sth to consider sth, for example when you are making a decision or planning sth:
The budget made allowance for inflation. * The plan makes no allowance for people working at different rates.
make allowances (for sb) to allow sb to behave in a way that you would not usually accept, because of a problem or because there is a special reason:
You have to make allowances for him because he's tired.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
Where does this definition of allowance come from?
This entry for allowance is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is allowance a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, allowance is tagged as noun.
Does allowance appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — allowance appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.