Noun

(en noun)

An act of doing good; a benefit, a blessing.

* 1999 , Joyce Crick, translating Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams , Oxford 2008, p. 70:

We all feel that sleep is a benefaction to our psychical life, and the obscure awareness of the popular mind is clearly unwilling to be robbed of its prejudice that the dream is one of the ways in which sleep confers its benefactions.

An act of charity; almsgiving.

Noun

(en noun)

(feudal law) A right to the use of a superior's land, as a stipend for services to be performed; also, the land so held; a fief.

(legal) An inheritable estate in land held of a feudal lord on condition of the performing of certain services.

(legal) An estate of inheritance in land, either absolute and without limitation to any particular class of heirs (fee simple) or limited to a particular class of heirs (fee tail).

(obsolete) Property; owndom; estate.

* Wordsworth, On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic

Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee .

* 1844 , , by (James Russell Lowell)

What doth the poor man's son inherit? / Stout muscles and a sinewy heart, / A hardy frame, a hardier spirit; / King of two hands, he does his part / In every useful toil and art; / A heritage, it seems to me, / A king might wish to hold in fee .

* 1915 , :

Cronshaw had told him that the facts of life mattered nothing to him who by the power of fancy held in fee the twin realms of space and time.

(obsolete) Money paid or bestowed; payment; emolument.

(obsolete) A prize or reward. Only used in the set phrase "A finder's fee" in Modern English.

* 1596 , (Edmund Spenser), (The Faerie Queene) , IV.10:

For though sweet love to conquer glorious bee, / Yet is the paine thereof much greater than the fee .

A monetary payment charged for professional services.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-07-19, author=(Peter Wilby)

, volume=189, issue=6, page=30, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Finland spreads word on schools , passage=Imagine a country where children do nothing but play until they start compulsory schooling at age seven. Then, without exception, they attend comprehensives until the age of 16. Charging school fees is illegal, and so is sorting pupils into ability groups by streaming or setting.}}