Purchasing

How to spell purchasing

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce purchasing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does purchasing mean?

1. verbAcquiring something by paying money for it.
2. nounThe function or department responsible for buying goods and services for an organisation.

Purchasing in a sentence

• verb

  The company is purchasing new laptops for the whole office.

• noun

  The purchasing team negotiates contracts with all the main suppliers.

• verb

  Before purchasing a house, she compared several mortgage offers.

• noun

  She works in purchasing and approves every order over a thousand pounds.

Where does purchasing come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back to the Old French verb purchacier, which meant 'to pursue' or 'to try hard to obtain', formed from pur- meaning 'forth' or 'forward' and chacier meaning 'to chase or hunt'; the very same chacier that gave English the word 'chase'. English took the word up in the 1200s, when 'purchase' first meant simply to seek out, win, or acquire something by effort rather than specifically by paying money. Over the following centuries the meaning narrowed to the now familiar idea of acquiring goods in exchange for payment, so that what was once a general pursuit became a commercial transaction. The -ing form is the ordinary present participle and gerund, used both as a verb and as a noun for the activity of buying. The hidden trap in the spelling is that first syllable: it is 'pur-', echoing the original pur- 'forth', and not 'per-', even though the unstressed vowel sounds neutral and tempts the 'per' spelling.

How the word is built

• pur- (forth, forward)
• chase (from chacier: to pursue, hunt)
• -ing (verbal/noun suffix)