Marketable

How to spell marketable

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce marketable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does marketable mean?

1. adjectiveAble to be sold easily because there is demand for it, or having qualities that make a person or thing attractive to buyers or employers.

Marketable in a sentence

• The developer redesigned the flat to make it more marketable to young families.

• A degree in data science gives graduates a highly marketable set of skills.

Where does marketable come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word 'market' descends from the Latin mercatus, meaning 'trade' or 'a place of trade', which itself grew from the verb mercari, 'to buy and sell', and ultimately from merx, the Latin word for goods or merchandise. That same root gave English the words 'merchant', 'commerce', and 'mercenary', all tied to the idea of dealing in goods. 'Market' entered English well before the Norman Conquest through an early Germanic borrowing of the Latin term, reinforced later by Old North French markiet. The suffix '-able' comes from the Latin -abilis, meaning 'fit for' or 'capable of', and was attached to countless English verbs and nouns to form adjectives. So 'marketable' literally means 'fit to be sold', a sense first recorded in the 1500s; the spelling keeps the full word 'market' intact before '-able', which is the easiest way to remember it.

How the word is built

• market (a place or system of trade, from Latin mercari 'to trade')
• -able (suffix meaning 'able to be, fit for')