746
Opinion of the Court
was indeed the basis for 19th-century decisions holding that flat charges violated state usury laws establishing maximum "rates." See, e. g., Craig v. Pleiss, 26 Pa. 271, 272-273 (1856); Hollowell, supra, at 286, 26 S. E., at 781. And there is no apparent reason why home-state-approved percentage charges should be permissible but home-state-approved flat charges unlawful. In any event, common usage at the time of the National Bank Act prevents the conclusion that the Comptroller's refusal to give the word "rate" the narrow meaning petitioner demands is unreasonable. The 1849 edition of Webster's gives as one of the definitions of "rate" the "[p]rice or amount stated or fixed on any thing." N. Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language 910. To illustrate this sense of the word, it provides the following examples: "A king may purchase territory at too dear a rate. The rate of interest is prescribed by law." Ibid. Cf. 2 Bouvier, supra, at 421 (defining "rate of exchange" as "the price at which a bill drawn in one country upon another, may be sold in the former").
Finally, petitioner contends that the late fees cannot be "interest" because they are "penalties." To support that dichotomy, she points to our opinion in Meilink v. Unemployment Reserves Comm'n of Cal., 314 U. S. 564, 570 (1942). But Meilink involved a provision of the Bankruptcy Act that disallowed debts owing to governmental entities "as a penalty," except for "the amount of the pecuniary loss sustained by the act . . . out of which the penalty . . . arose, with . . . such interest as may have accrued thereon according to law." Id., at 566. Obviously, this provision uses "interest" to mean only that interest which is exacted as commercial compensation, and not that interest which is exacted as a penalty. A word often takes on a more narrow connotation when it is expressly opposed to another word: "car," for example, has a broader meaning by itself than it does in a passage speaking of "cars and taxis." In § 85, the term "interest" is not used in contradistinction to "penalty," and
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