1 ~ sb (as sth) to give sb a job to do for payment:
[VN] How many people does the company employ? * For the past three years he has been employed as a firefighter. * [VNtoinf] A number of people have been employed to deal with the backlog of work.
seealsoSELF-EMPLOYED, UNEMPLOYED
2 [VN] (formal) to use sth such as a skill, method etc. for a particular purpose:
He criticized the repressive methods employed by the country's government. * The police had to employ force to enter the building.
IDIOMS
be employed in doing sth (written) if a person or their time is employed in doing sth, the person spends time doing that thing:
She was employed in making a list of all the jobs to be done.
noun [U]
IDIOMS
in sb's employ
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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.
This entry for employ is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is employ a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, employ is tagged as verb.
Does employ appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — employ 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.
