What is the difference between retire and pension?

in American English, at least, retire refers to leaving your job and no longer working after a long lifetime of working. Pension is the money that you get after retirement, typically because you have contributed money to a common retirement fund during your years of employment, and now the pension is simply the repayment of that money and what it earned over the years.

You normally cannot receive a pension until you have retired. However, some civil-service type jobs, like policemen and fireman (and many others), are designed so that a person can receive pension after 20 or 25 years of service (rather than upon reaching retirement age, which is generally something like 63, although it is changing as people live longer). Thus, it is possible for a person to retire from civil service and receive a pension, and then go work elsewhere for another 10-20 years, and perhaps even get a pension from that work as well. This is often called double-dipping. They are receiving a retirement pension but they really haven't retired-they just have retired from the original job.

Pension is the remuneration you receive after retirement. Sometimes retirees are referred to as pensioners.

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