English

Verb

shell out ‎(third-person singular simple present shells out, present participle shelling out, simple past and past participle shelled out)

1. (idiomatic) To pay money, to disburse ; especially, to pay a great deal of money.

   Do you think we should shell out for the extra options package?

   • 2016 October 24, Owen Gibson, “Is the unthinkable happening – are people finally switching the football off?”, in The Guardian, London:

     BT shelled out almost £1bn for the Champions League over the same period, while the FA has just brought in around £820m over six seasons for the international rights to the FA Cup alone.

2. (computing, chiefly Unix) To use a program's "shell escape" function to execute an unrelated command or to invoke a subsidiary, interactive shell.

Synonyms

• (to pay) cough up, fork out, fork over

Translations