in kind
in kind (idiom)
/ɪn kaɪnd/
Meaning
- Reply with the same kind of action or treatment, often as payback.
- Pay or give with goods, services, or produce instead of money.
- Belong to the same type or nature, not just a bigger or smaller version of the same thing.
Synonyms: in the same way, likewise, reciprocally, equivalently, tit for tat, in goods, in services, non-monetary, in trade.
Example Sentences
- Sarah mocked Mike in the meeting, and he answered in kind with a sharp remark of his own.
- After Mike hosted dinner last month, Sarah repaid him in kind by cooking for the whole group.
- The farm workers were paid in kind with grain and milk instead of cash.
- The charity asked for money, but Mike gave an in-kind gift of laptops and software.
- The two plans differ in size, not in kind; both follow the same basic idea.
Etymology and Origin
An English Phrase with a Latin Backbone
In kind grew up in England. The words themselves are homegrown. Kind had long meant a type, a class, or the nature of a thing. What English writers needed in the 1500s was a plain way to say what Latin lawyers already said with in specie: give back the thing itself, not a pile of coins that stand in for it. So they said it in English. The speech is English. The thinking behind it is older and more formal.
Before Money Entered the Picture
The phrase did not start in markets. In the 1300s, in kind could simply mean “as a thing is by nature.” A wound out of kind was a wound gone wrong. That sense faded. The meaning that lasted was practical. When rent, tax, tithe, or a loan had to be settled, people asked whether the debt would be paid in money or in the actual goods. Grain, cattle, cloth, and labor all counted. Cash was the other option, not the only one.
The First Printed Trail
The payment sense shows up clearly in London in 1578. Thomas Rogers, translating a treatise against usury and adding a piece on the lawful use of riches, wrote that a lender gives a thing “vppon condition that the same thyng in kinde be repaied.” A few years later Edmund Bunny made the same split: some would rather pay “the valu of it in monie, than the thing it selfe in kind.” Francis Bacon used it again in 1622, noting that captors might “take them in Kind, or compound for them.” The spelling wobbles. The idea does not.
When a Reply Became the Point
By the early 1700s the phrase had stepped out of the barn and into manners. In 1726 George Roberts hoped he might one day “return them in Kind.” After that, an insult, a favor, or a blow could be answered the same way. The money sense never left. It simply gained a partner: do to someone what they did to you.
A Quiet Split That Still Confuses People
Here is the twist. In specie once meant almost exactly what in kind means. Then English gave in specie a second job as a name for coin. The two phrases, which began as translations of each other, drifted into opposite corners. One now points to goods and matching treatment. The other points to hard money. Readers who meet both can feel they have wandered into two different languages. They have not. They have met a family that stopped speaking alike.
Why the Old Habit Never Quite Died
English farmers paid tithes in wheat and wool long after coins were common. Writers still talked of being forced to take tithes in kind. The custom is older than the printed phrase. The phrase simply gave the custom a name that stuck. Today the same wording turns up in charity gifts, campaign support, and those odd loans that pay interest by adding more debt instead of cash. The hyphen in in-kind is modern. The thought is not.
The Fun in the History
People have been paid in goods for thousands of years. Mesopotamian workers took beer rations. That is the habit, not the English wording. What England added was a short, durable label that could cover a sack of grain, a returned kindness, and a returned slight. Few phrases travel that far on so little ink.
Variants
- in-kind
- payment in kind
- pay in kind
- benefits in kind
- respond in kind
- repay in kind
- return in kind
- contribution in kind
- donation in kind
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