Merchandising

How to spell merchandising

13 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce merchandising

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does merchandising mean?

1. nounThe activity of promoting, displaying, and arranging goods to encourage sales.
2. nounProducts, often featuring a logo or character, sold to promote a film, band, or brand.

Merchandising in a sentence

• The store redesigned its window displays as part of a new merchandising strategy.

• The film studio earned more from merchandising than from ticket sales.

• Clever merchandising placed the sweets right beside the checkout queue.

• Fans queued at the concert to buy official merchandising such as shirts and posters.

Where does merchandising come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin merx, meaning 'goods' or 'wares', and its related verb mercari, 'to trade'. From merx came the Old French marchand, 'a trader', and marchandise, 'goods for sale', which English borrowed in the 1300s as 'merchandise'. The verb 'to merchandise', meaning to buy and sell or to promote goods, grew from the noun, and adding the suffix '-ing' produced 'merchandising' for the activity itself. The same Latin merx underlies a whole family of commercial words, including 'merchant', 'mercantile', 'commerce', and even 'mercury' through the Roman god of trade. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the unstressed 'chan' is easy to slip, and the soft '-dis-' before '-ing' is sometimes wrongly doubled or written with a 'z' in the British form.

How the word is built

• merchand- (from merchant, dealer in goods)
• -ise (verb suffix)
• -ing (gerund/noun suffix)