"Spend" as a noun?!

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:31 PM -0500 11/18/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
>While leafing through a mag called _ComputerWord for Pharmacists_, I ran
>across the phrase, "... would entail a greater *spend*." A quick look at
>Google yielded 206,000,000 hits, clearly too many to sift through, for
>"spend." However, "greater spend" yielded a more manageable 712 hits,
>including, e.g. ",,, ensuring greater _spend_ per visitor ...," "Fewer
>stops. Greater _spend_," and "... the greater spend of foreign visitors."
>--
>-Wilson Gray

If you hadn't provided the context, I'd have guessed "ensuring
greater spend per visitor" was a continuation of our earlier thread
in the domain of what Farmer & Henley call "venery".  Of course that
would relate not to pharmacies but other sorts of establishments.

Larry