Meaning & use
line items
Last updated
“line items” is a form of “line item”. See that entry for the full set of meanings.
Meanings
nounpluralbusiness
Separate entries on a bill, budget or financial document, each showing one product, service or cost with its own amount.
Grammar: Plural of line item: one line item or several line items.
Patterns
- list something as a line item
- review the line items
The invoice listed shipping and installation as separate line items.
Please check each of the line items in the budget before we approve it.
Auditors questioned several line items that had no receipts.
nounpluralbusiness
Individual spending items in a government budget that a legislator can approve, change or cancel.
Grammar: Used mostly in politics: line item veto.
Patterns
- cut line items
- the budget's line items
The governor wanted the power to cut individual line items without rejecting the whole budget.
Several line items for road repairs were removed from the final plan.
Word forms
| singular | line item |
|---|
Common combinations
- individual line items
- Each of the individual line items must be justified.
- budget line items
- Budget line items include salaries, rent and supplies.
- itemized line items
- The itemized line items made the bill easier to understand.
- remove line items
- We removed two line items to reduce the total.
- line item veto
- The president asked Congress for a line item veto.
Synonyms and how they differ
- entries
- Entries is a general word for anything recorded in a list, while line items belong specifically to financial documents.
- charges
- Charges are the amounts billed, while line items are the individual rows on the document listing them.
- itemized costs
- Itemized costs stresses that every cost is listed, whereas line items are the entries themselves.
Opposites
Word family
- line noun
- a row of text or figures
- item noun
- a single thing in a list
- itemize verb
- to list every part separately
- itemization noun
- a detailed list of items
Commonly confused: line items or line items vs. subtotal?
line items vs line items vs. subtotal
A subtotal is a partial sum of several items, while a line item is one single entry.
Practice
The contractor's invoice showed each cost on its own row, so we could question specific ____.
Choose one answer.
Line items are the individual rows on a bill or budget. The other words contain the word line but do not mean entries on a document.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “line items”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.