Business
nounCommercial activity, or a company or organisation engaged in trade.
How to spell business
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce business
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does business mean?
- nounCommercial activity, or a company or organisation engaged in trade.
- nounA matter, task, or affair that concerns a particular person.
Business in a sentence
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She runs a small catering business from her kitchen.
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How she spends her own money is nobody else's business.
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The family business has supplied timber for three generations.
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Sorting out the inheritance was a painful business for the whole family.
Where does business come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Business descends from the Old English bisignes, which combined bisig, meaning 'occupied' or 'anxious', with the abstract suffix -nes that turns an adjective into a state or condition. In its earliest life the word meant something close to 'anxiety', 'care', or 'being busy', and that older sense of restless occupation lingered for centuries. By the late Middle Ages it had broadened to mean any task, affair, or matter that occupied a person, and only later did it narrow into the commercial sense of trade and enterprise that dominates today. The spelling preserves the silent middle of busy: we pronounce it 'biz-ness', yet the letters faithfully record its descent from busy plus -ness, which is exactly why writers drop the unsounded i. The same root sits inside the adjective busy itself, a useful reminder that business is literally the state of being busy.
How the word is built
- busy (occupied, active)
- -ness (state or condition); the y of busy becomes i before the suffix, giving busi-ness
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