Mercantile

How to spell mercantile

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce mercantile

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mercantile mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to trade, commerce, or the business of buying and selling goods.

Mercantile in a sentence

• The old port town built its wealth on mercantile trade with distant colonies.

• The family ran a busy mercantile firm that imported tea and spices.

Where does mercantile come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Mercantile traces back to the Latin verb mercari, meaning 'to trade' or 'to deal in goods', which itself grew from the noun merx, meaning 'merchandise' or 'wares'. From mercari Latin formed mercans, the present participle describing someone engaged in trading, and this gave rise to the Italian mercantile, meaning 'of or relating to merchants'. English picked the word up around the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, partly through Italian commercial vocabulary and partly through French, at a time when European trade and banking were expanding rapidly. The same merx and mercari roots sit inside a whole family of familiar words, including merchant, merchandise, commerce, market, and even Mercury, the Roman god of trade. Remembering that buried 'mercari' root helps with the spelling, since the middle of the word keeps the trader's 'mercant' intact before the soft '-ile' ending.

How the word is built

• mercant- (from Latin mercari: to trade, deal in goods)
• -ile (adjective suffix: relating to)