get one’s money’s worth, to

To obtain full value for something. This term actually dates back as far as the fourteenth century, and from that time on there are numerous appearances in print citing the legal exchange of “money or money-worth”—that is, payment is to be made in cash or its equivalent worth. It is spelled out in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (2.1), in which the King of Navarre explains that, in surety of the hundred thou- sand crowns still owing, “one part of Aquitaine is bound to us, although not valued to the money’s worth.” The precise modern wording dates from the nineteenth century. The English scholar Benjamin Jowett wrote (1875), “I give my pupils their money’s worth.”