Mart

How to spell mart

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mart

What does mart mean?

1. nounA market or shop, especially a centre for buying and selling goods.

Mart in a sentence

• The corner mart stays open until midnight for late shoppers.

• Farmers brought their produce to the weekend mart in the town square.

Where does mart come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The word 'mart' came into English in the late 1400s as a shortened, contracted form of 'market', borrowed from the Middle Dutch 'markt' (earlier 'marct'), meaning a public place for buying and selling. The Dutch word itself traces back to the Latin 'mercatus', meaning 'trade' or 'a marketplace', which was built on the verb 'mercari', 'to trade or do business', from 'merx', meaning 'goods or merchandise'. That same Latin 'merx' family gives us familiar relatives such as 'merchant', 'commerce', and 'mercenary'. Where 'market' kept the fuller Latin-influenced ending, 'mart' preserved the clipped Dutch shape, which is why today it survives mostly in brand and shop names. The short, almost phonetic spelling is the reason it is rarely misspelled: it simply reads as it sounds.

How the word is built

• mart (root noun, a contracted form of 'market')