Marketing

How to spell marketing

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce marketing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does marketing mean?

1. nounThe activity and process of promoting, advertising, and selling products or services.

Marketing in a sentence

• The company spent most of its budget on marketing this quarter.

• She works in marketing for a large software firm.

Where does marketing come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The root sits in the Latin mercatus, meaning 'trade' or 'a marketplace', which itself came from the verb mercari 'to trade or to buy' and ultimately from merx, meaning 'goods' or 'merchandise'. The same merx root quietly survives in a cluster of familiar English words, including 'merchant', 'commerce', and 'mercenary'. English took 'market' through Anglo-Norman French in the medieval period, when it named a physical place where goods were bought and sold on appointed days. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 'marketing' described the act of going to market to buy or sell, and only in the modern commercial era did it narrow to its present meaning: the whole business of promoting and selling products. The spelling is mercifully regular, since the single 't' is not doubled before '-ing', a small mercy that trips up far fewer writers than words like 'omitting'.

How the word is built

• market (from Latin mercatus: trade, marketplace)
• -ing (noun-forming suffix denoting an activity)