Meaning
To receive full value, benefit, or enjoyment in return for what you paid or the effort you put in. Used of purchases, outings, subscriptions, and experiences; often said when someone extracts every last drop of value, sometimes stubbornly so. Neutral, everyday register; can be approving or faintly mocking of someone determined to extract every penny of value. Regional use: General English.
Origin
This is commercial language rather than a metaphor with a hidden story: 'money's worth' names the value equivalent to the money laid out, and the OED's earliest evidence for the noun phrase is from 1578, in the late 1500s. The construction 'for your money' and the full idiomatic frame 'to have or get one's money's worth' grew directly out of ordinary trading talk about fair value, and Merriam-Webster still defines 'one's money's worth' as what one deserves because of money paid or effort made. The anchor's 19th-century date is not supported: the phrase is Elizabethan, and only its modern consumer-culture prominence - reviews, ticket prices, buffet tables - is recent. Because the expression was never coined by a single writer, there is no origin story to trace beyond the honest one that it has meant fair value for over four centuries.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- get one's money's worth
- have your money's worth
- money's worth
- worth your money
Usage Examples
- Arrive at opening time if you want to get your money's worth out of the museum.
- He certainly got his money's worth from those boots - five winters and counting.
- Critics agreed the show was overlong, but nobody could say they left without getting their money's worth.