Businessmen

How to spell businessmen

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce businessmen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does businessmen mean?

1. nounMore than one man who works in commerce, trade, or the running of a company.

Businessmen in a sentence

• Several local businessmen sponsored the charity dinner.

• The lounge was full of businessmen checking their phones before the flight.

Where does businessmen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a transparent compound built from two native English elements joined long after each had its own history. The first part, 'business', grew out of the Old English 'bisignes', formed from the adjective 'bisig' meaning 'busy, occupied, anxiously engaged' plus the noun-forming suffix '-nes'. For centuries 'business' simply meant the state of being busy, but by the 1500s it had narrowed toward commercial dealings and trade. The second part, 'men', is the ordinary plural of 'man', from Old English 'mann', meaning a human being or, more narrowly, an adult male. The compound 'businessman' was assembled in the nineteenth century to name a man engaged in commerce, and its plural 'businessmen' follows the irregular man/men vowel change rather than adding a regular '-s'. The spelling trap lives in the silent middle: 'business' keeps the 'i' of 'busy' even though the pronunciation has collapsed it, so writers must remember busi-ness before the men.

How the word is built

• busy (occupied, from Old English bisig)
• -ness (noun-forming suffix: state or quality)
• men (plural of man)