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expend

/ɪkˈspend//ɪkˈspend/·verb
to use up effort, energy, or resources in doing something
Fig. 1 — The hopper's little window shows a full charge of coal, and the machine begins its honest arithmetic: lumps drop, the fire takes them, the flywheel turns, the belt hauls the work away to wherever work goes.
01Definition

To expend is to pay in something other than money: energy, effort, ammunition, political capital — resources that go down as the work gets done. From Latin expendere, 'to weigh out, pay', it is the formal cousin of spend, and it keeps the account-book flavour: what is expended is measured, budgeted, and gone. The family carries the meaning further — expenditure is the formal noun (government expenditure on health), and expendable marks what may be used up and lost: expendable parts, and, chillingly, expendable people.

02In use
  • iSprinters expend in ten seconds what a marathon spends an hour collecting.
  • iiThe committee expended enormous effort on a rule that nobody would ever read.
  • iiiRather than deplete its reserves, the army chose to expend the older shells first.
03Collocations
  • expend energy
  • expend effort
  • expend resources
  • government expenditure
  • expend considerable effort

Family expenditure (noun) · expendable (adjective) · expense (noun)

04Relations

=consume, use up, spend, exhaust, deplete

≠conserve, retain, save

06TOEFL & IELTS

IELTS Writing Task 1 practically owns the noun: charts of government expenditure on education and health want 'expenditure rose/fell', not 'spending money went up'. The verb upgrades 'use': organisms expend energy, projects expend resources. Keep it apart from spend — you spend money and time, but expend effort and energy, and expend always implies the supply is finite. And watch the lookalike expand (grow larger); one vowel separates a budget from a balloon.

07Asked
What is the difference between expend and spend?
Register and cargo. Spend is the everyday verb and owns money and time: spend £50, spend an afternoon. Expend is formal and technical, and owns energy, effort and resources: muscles expend energy, missions expend fuel. The overlap is real but asymmetric — 'expend money' sounds like an auditor wrote it, while 'spend energy' is fine in speech but loses the precise, metered tone academic writing wants.
What does expendable mean?
Usable-up-able: designed or deemed acceptable to consume and lose. Engineering means it neutrally — expendable boosters are used once and thrown away by design. Applied to people it turns cold: troops or staff treated as expendable are being budgeted like fuel, and the word's power in essays comes from exactly that discomfort. The action-film franchise trades on the same edge: men sent where losses are already priced in.
What is the noun form of expend — expenditure or expense?
Both, split by formality and scale. Expenditure is the formal, aggregate noun — public expenditure, capital expenditure, a company's annual expenditure — the one IELTS charts use. Expense is the everyday item-level noun: travel expenses, a large expense. So a government's expenditure is made of thousands of expenses; use the long word for totals and reports, the short one for items.
Do you expend or spend energy?
Both are correct; expend is the precise register. Physiology and physics write 'the energy expended during exercise' because the verb carries measurement — energy weighed out against work done, which is the scene above in one clause: coal down, turns delivered. In conversation 'I spent all my energy' is natural; in a lab report it would read casual. Match the verb to the shirt the sentence is wearing.
What is the difference between expend and expand?
A single vowel and opposite directions: expend uses something up (resources fall), expand makes something larger (extent grows). A company expanding while its cash expends is having a very specific quarter. A memory hook: expEND uses things up until they end; expAND spreads out in every direction, like its cousin expanse.