Microspeak: spend

Remember, Microspeak is not merely for jargon exclusive to Microsoft, but it’s jargon you need to know. We don’t encounter the term spend much in the engineering side of the company, but it’s in common use among those who regularly deal with money and budgets.

We are in line with company standards with regard to spend for this type of event.

Q4 spend will be higher as a result of widget recolorization.

Our corresponding spend will increase significantly if we adopt this proposal.

From the above citations, it is apparent that the word spend is shorthand for expenditure. And then there’s this citation:

I’ll let you know what we have available with respect to spend.

So much for that theory. Here, spend means available budget. My new theory is that spend is shorthand for spending.

This appears to be common use in business-speak:

IT Spend Report Shows Tougher Times Ahead

The spend is 15% more than the 100m T-Mobile allocated to marketing last year