Dealership

How to spell dealership

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dealership

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dealership mean?

1. nounA business that is authorised to sell a particular company's products, especially cars.

Dealership in a sentence

• The local car dealership offered a discount on last year's models.

• She took the faulty vehicle back to the dealership for repairs.

Where does dealership come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the native English verb 'deal', which descends from the Old English dǣlan, meaning 'to divide, share out, or distribute'. Over the centuries the sense of dividing goods broadened into the modern idea of doing business or trading, so a 'dealer' became someone who buys and sells. To this the suffix '-ship' was attached, an old Germanic ending found in words like 'friendship' and 'partnership', which originally meant a state, quality, or office, and here marks the business or franchise of a dealer. The compound 'dealership' is comparatively recent, emerging in American commerce in the early twentieth century alongside the rise of the motor car, when manufacturers granted franchised outlets the right to sell their vehicles. Because the word stacks two suffixes onto a one-syllable root, its only real spelling snag is remembering the single 'l' in 'deal' before the '-ership' tail.

How the word is built

• deal (from Old English dǣlan: to divide, distribute, do business)
• -er (agent suffix: one who deals)
• -ship (noun suffix: state, office, or business)