LIABILITIES

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does liabilities mean? 

• LIABILITIES (noun)
  The noun LIABILITIES has 1 sense:

1. anything that is owed to someone else

  Familiarity information: LIABILITIES used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LIABILITIES (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Anything that is owed to someone else

Classified under:

Nouns denoting possession and transfer of possession

Hypernyms ("liabilities" is a kind of...):

possession (anything owned or possessed)

Domain usage:

plural; plural form (the form of a word that is used to denote more than one)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "liabilities"):

tax liability (the amount of tax owed; calculated by applying the tax rate to the tax base)

payables (money that you currently expect to pay on notes and accounts)

deficit (an excess of liabilities over assets (usually over a certain period))

debt (money or goods or services owed by one person to another)

charge (financial liabilities (such as a tax))

accounts payable (a debtor's accounts of money he owes; normally arise from the purchase of products or services)

 Context examples 

The victim, from my cradle, of pecuniary liabilities to which I have been unable to respond, I have ever been the sport and toy of debasing circumstances.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I do not deny that he has kept me in the dark as to his resources and his liabilities both, she went on, looking at the wall; but I never will desert Mr. Micawber!

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I had often thought of the Micawbers, but chiefly to wonder what pecuniary liabilities they were establishing in Canterbury, and to recall how shy Mr. Micawber was of me when he became clerk to Uriah Heep.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Traddles, with a perceptible lengthening of his face, explained that he had not been able to approach this subject; that it had shared the fate of Mr. Micawber's liabilities, in not being comprehended in the terms he had made; that we were no longer of any authority with Uriah Heep; and that if he could do us, or any of us, any injury or annoyance, no doubt he would.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil—I allude to spectacles—and possessing myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate pretensions.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Suffice it to observe, that it was a masterpiece of eloquence; and that those passages in which he more particularly traced his own successful career to its source, and warned the younger portion of his auditory from the shoals of ever incurring pecuniary liabilities which they were unable to liquidate, brought a tear into the manliest eye present.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Where, for the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed, from day to day, by importune voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was no knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where personal service of process was not required, and detainees were merely lodged at the gate!

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

How the emigrants never wrote home, otherwise than cheerfully and hopefully; how Mr. Micawber had actually remitted divers small sums of money, on account of those pecuniary liabilities, in reference to which he had been so business-like as between man and man; how Janet, returning into my aunt's service when she came back to Dover, had finally carried out her renunciation of mankind by entering into wedlock with a thriving tavern-keeper; and how my aunt had finally set her seal on the same great principle, by aiding and abetting the bride, and crowning the marriage-ceremony with her presence; were among our topics—already more or less familiar to me through the letters I had had.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)