Retail

How to spell retail

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce retail

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does retail mean?

1. nounThe sale of goods to the public in relatively small quantities, rather than for resale.
2. verbTo sell goods to the public in small quantities at a set price.

Retail in a sentence

• noun

  After years in marketing she moved into retail and now runs three shops.

• verb

  The new headphones retail for around ninety pounds in most stores.

• noun

  The company sells directly to customers, so its retail margins are higher.

• verb

  Small farms retail their produce at the weekend market.

Where does retail come from?

Language of origin: French

Retail comes from the Old French word retaillier, which meant 'to cut off, to clip, or to divide into pieces'. That verb was built from the prefix re-, used here as an intensifier, and taillier, meaning 'to cut', the same root that gives us 'tailor' (one who cuts cloth) and 'tally'. The commercial sense arose because a retailer was originally someone who broke bulk goods into small portions to sell on to ordinary customers, in contrast to selling in large wholesale quantities. English adopted the word in the late fourteenth century, at first as a verb for selling in small amounts and soon as a noun for that kind of trade. A now old-fashioned figurative sense, 'to retail a story', meaning to pass it on piece by piece, preserves the original idea of dividing something up and dealing it out bit by bit.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• tail (from Old French taillier: to cut) = goods cut up into small lots for sale