Consumer

How to spell consumer

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce consumer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does consumer mean?

1. nounA person who buys and uses goods or services for personal use, rather than producing or reselling them.
2. nounA person or thing that uses up a resource such as fuel, energy, or food.

Consumer in a sentence

• The average consumer now compares prices online before buying anything.

• That old boiler is a heavy consumer of gas and should be replaced.

• New labelling rules are meant to protect the ordinary consumer.

• The factory is the single largest consumer of water in the region.

Where does consumer come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb consumere, meaning 'to use up' or 'to devour completely', formed from the intensifying prefix com- and sumere, which meant 'to take up' or 'to seize'. It came into English through Old French in the late 1300s, at first carrying the harsher sense of wasting, destroying, or eating away; a fire could consume a building, and a fever could consume a body (the old word 'consumption' for tuberculosis preserves exactly that grim meaning). The agent noun 'consumer', built with the familiar -er ending for 'one who does', appeared by the early 1500s for any person or thing that uses something up. Its modern economic meaning, a person who buys goods and services as opposed to one who produces them, is much younger and rose to prominence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because the spelling keeps the single -s- and -um- of the Latin sumere rather than the sound a writer might expect, the word looks tidier than it sounds.

How the word is built

• con- (intensive, from Latin com-: completely)
• sum (from sumere: to take up, use)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)