Agency

How to spell agency

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce agency

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does agency mean?

1. nounA business or organisation that provides a particular service or acts on behalf of others.
2. nounThe capacity or power of a person to act independently and make their own choices.

Agency in a sentence

• The recruitment agency found her a temporary office job within a week.

• Giving staff real agency over their schedules improved morale across the team.

• They booked the entire holiday through a local travel agency.

• The therapy aimed to restore his sense of personal agency after the illness.

Where does agency come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb agere, which literally meant 'to do, to drive, or to set in motion', the same root that gives us 'act', 'agent', and 'agile'. From agere came the medieval Latin noun agentia, describing the condition of acting or operating, and English adopted 'agency' in the early 1600s. The earliest English meaning was simply 'active operation' or 'the exercise of power to produce an effect', which survives in phrases about human agency. Only later, by the 1800s, did it settle into the familiar commercial sense of an office or organisation that acts on behalf of others, such as a travel or employment agency. The spelling trap is the unstressed ending: it is -ency, not -ancy, even though the schwa offers no clue, and it ties back to the agent who does the work.

How the word is built

• ag- (from Latin agere: to do, drive, act)
• -ency (noun suffix denoting state or function)