expense

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun Something spent to attain a goal or accomplish a purpose.
• noun A loss for the sake of something gained; a sacrifice.
• noun An expenditure of money; a cost.
• noun Charges incurred by an employee in the performance of work.
• noun Informal Money allotted for payment of such charges.
• noun Something requiring the expenditure of money.
• noun Archaic The act of expending.
• transitive verb To charge with expenses.
• transitive verb To write off as an expense.
• idiom (at (one's) expense) To one's detriment or chagrin.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A laying out or expending; the disbursing of money; employment and consumption, as of time or labor; expenditure.
• noun Specifically Great or undue expenditure; prodigality.
• noun That which is expended, laid out, or consumed; especially, money expended; cost; charge: as, a prudent man limits his expenses by his income.
• noun Cost through diminution or deterioration; damage or loss from any detracting cause, especially a moral one: preceded by at: as, he did this at the expense of his character.
• To charge or debit with an item of incurred expense to be collected from the proper party and accounted for by the chargee: used chiefly in dealings between express or railway companies or their agencies.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun A spending or consuming; disbursement; expenditure.
• noun That which is expended, laid out, or consumed; cost; outlay; charge; -- sometimes with the notion of loss or damage to those on whom the expense falls.
• noun obsolete Loss.
• noun (Mil.) a small magazine containing ammunition for immediate use.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A spending or consuming. Often specifically an act of disbursing or spending funds.
• noun That which is expended, laid out, or consumed. Sometimes with the notion of loss or damage to those on whom the expense falls.
• noun obsolete Loss.
• verb transitive To charge a cost against an expense account; to bill something to the company for which one works.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a detriment or sacrifice
• noun money spent to perform work and usually reimbursed by an employer
• verb reduce the estimated value of something
• noun amounts paid for goods and services that may be currently tax deductible (as opposed to capital expenditures)