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Is there a single word for "able to be expensed"? Expensable and expensible do not appear to be in any dictionary I've seen, but I'd swear I've seen them used.

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  • The word claimable might work.
    – J.R.
    Mar 16, 2013 at 10:52

3 Answers 3

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In US English, I've seen the term reimbursable used for a business expense for which your employer will repay you at a later date.

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  • It's already implied in this answer, but I'd like to note explicitly that reimbursable refers to a wholly contained subset of expensable items. There may be a one-to-one correlation depending on the workplace (i.e. everything expensable is reimbursable), but there are useful distinctions between the two words in terms of specificity and implied outcome. Nov 28, 2017 at 17:42
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“Expensable” is the right word. Here it is in eHow’s definition of expense reports:

Meals and entertainment are often expensable costs
Source: eHow, What Is the Definition of an Expense Report?

Here it is in a Wikipedia article on Capital expenditure:

Most ordinary business expenses are clearly either expensable or capitalizable
Source: Wikipedia, Capital expenditure

It’s formed by adding the highly productive suffix “-able” (meaning fit for) to the verb “expense”.

-able

  1. a suffix meaning “capable of, susceptible of, fit for, tending to, given to,” associated in meaning with the word able, occurring in loanwords from Latin (laudable); used in English as a highly productive suffix to form adjectives by addition to stems of any origin (teachable; photographable).

Source: dictionary.com definition of -able

I hear this word used all the time in my office (in Chicago). Dictionaries don’t always list every adjective that gets formed like this.

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How about consumable or simply usable?

Are you sure what you saw was not expansible? Which looks very alike, but means "able to be expanded."

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