Exec

How to spell exec

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce exec

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exec mean?

1. nounAn informal term for a senior manager or executive in a company.

Exec in a sentence

• The marketing exec approved the new budget this morning.

• Every exec at the firm received a year-end bonus.

Where does exec come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a casual clipping of 'executive', a word that traces back to the Latin verb exsequi, meaning 'to follow out' or 'to carry through to the end', built from ex- 'out' and sequi 'to follow'. The Latin past-participle stem executus gave Medieval Latin executivus, the sense being someone or something that actually carries plans into action rather than merely deciding them. English borrowed 'executive' in the seventeenth century, first as an adjective for the power to put laws and decisions into effect, and later as a noun for the senior managers who run an organisation. The short form 'exec' arose in twentieth-century office and business slang as a brisk, informal way of naming such a manager, and it picked up a parallel life in computing for an executable program or a system command. The same sequi 'to follow' root quietly sits inside 'sequence', 'consequence', and 'pursue', so the family is large even though the clipped spelling looks tiny.

How the word is built

• clipped form of exec(utive), from Latin exsequi (to carry out)