Subsidy

1. n. A grant from the government, from a municipal corporation, or the like, to a private person or company to assist the establishment or support of an enterprise deemed advantageous to the public; a subvention; as, a subsidy to the owners of a line of ocean steamships.
2. n. Support; aid; cooperation; esp., extraordinary aid in money rendered to the sovereign or to a friendly power.
3. n. Specifically: A sum of money paid by one sovereign or nation to another to purchase the cooperation or the neutrality of such sovereign or nation in war.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.