Market

How to spell market

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce market

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does market mean?

1. nounA place or system where goods are bought and sold, or the demand for a particular product.
2. verbTo advertise or promote a product so that people will buy it.

Market in a sentence

• noun

  The farmers' market opens early every Saturday morning.

• verb

  The company plans to market its new app to younger customers.

• noun

  There is a strong market for electric cars this year.

• verb

  They hired an agency to market the resort overseas.

Where does market come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin mercatus, meaning 'trade' or 'a marketplace', which itself grew from mercari 'to buy and sell' and the root merx 'merchandise, goods'. It travelled into English through the Norman French and Old North French forms market and marchet around the twelfth century, naming the public gathering where buying and selling took place. Over time the sense broadened from the physical square full of stalls to the whole abstract notion of supply and demand, so that today we speak of the housing market or the stock market with no literal square in sight. The same Latin merx root sits inside relatives such as 'merchant', 'commerce', and 'mercenary', all tied to the idea of trade. The simple spelling rarely traps adults, since it follows an ordinary mark- plus -et pattern.

How the word is built

• mark- (from Latin mercatus: trade, marketplace)
• -et