Taxes refers to money paid to the government other than for transaction-specific goods and services. It commonly describes a burdensome demand, a task exacted from one who is under control; a contribution or service, the rendering of which is imposed upon a subject, and charge; censure, which gives the term a broader and more practical sense than a single short definition would suggest. Depending on context, it can also point to a lesson to be learned, the directional movement of an organism in response to a stimulus, and the manipulation of a body part into its normal position after injury, so the category can cover literal uses, related ideas, and more figurative extensions of the same core meaning. Taken together, these meanings present Taxes as a flexible theme rather than a narrowly technical label, covering the central idea people usually mean when they use the word while still leaving room for closely related senses that appear in real language. Additional shades of meaning include the arrangement of the parts of a topic, arrangement or ordering generally, as in architecture or grammar, a brigade in an Ancient Greek army, to impose and collect a tax from (a person or company), and to impose and collect a tax on (something), which reinforce how the category can stretch across adjacent but still recognizable uses of the same term.
