Usage

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈjuːsɪd͡ʒ/

Definitions

1. The customary way in which something is employed or the manner in which words are conventionally used in a language
2. The manner in which something is utilized, alongside the accepted conventions for how language, particularly words, are implemented within communication
3. The habitual or accepted application of an item or the traditional conventions governing the use of language elements like words

Etymology: The most useful thing to know about "usage" is that its suffix is not what it looks like. Read it as "use" plus "-age" and you would be right about the surface, but the word was borrowed whole from Anglo-Norman and Old French "usage", which had already taken its shape from "user" (to use) in that language. English took the finished noun rather than building it from parts, so the "-age" is best seen as a French ending that came along with the word. The sense of "usage" has also narrowed and widened in interesting ways. Its earliest English senses centred on habit and custom, the way things are regularly done, and only later settled into the two meanings you see now: the manner in which something is put to work, and the accepted conventions of how words are actually employed in speech and writing. Those two strands are closely related, since a language's usage is simply the habitual use its speakers make of it.

Synonyms: employment, application, utilization, exploitation, function