Shareholder

How to spell shareholder

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce shareholder

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shareholder mean?

1. nounA person or organisation that owns shares in a company and therefore holds a stake in it.

Shareholder in a sentence

• Every shareholder received a copy of the annual report by post.

• The company called a vote so each shareholder could approve the merger.

Where does shareholder come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'share' and 'holder', both of which descend from Old English. 'Share' comes from the Old English 'scearu', meaning a cutting or division, related to the verb 'sceran' 'to cut or shear', so a share was literally a portion sliced off the whole. 'Holder' is built from the Old English 'haldan' 'to keep or grasp' plus the agent suffix '-er', naming the person who holds something. The financial sense of 'share', a unit of ownership in a company, grew up alongside the great joint-stock trading companies of the 1600s, and 'shareholder' followed naturally as the person holding those units. Because every part of the word is spelled exactly as it sounds in its own right, the only real trap is remembering it is written as one solid word rather than two.

How the word is built

• share (a portion of ownership)
• holder (one who holds, from hold
• -er)