Supplier
nounA person or company that provides goods or services to others, especially as a business.
How to spell supplier
8 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce supplier
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does supplier mean?
- nounA person or company that provides goods or services to others, especially as a business.
Supplier in a sentence
-
The restaurant switched to a cheaper supplier of fresh vegetables.
-
Our main supplier raised its prices again this quarter.
Where does supplier come from?
Language of origin: Latin
Supplier is built on the verb supply, which English took in the late 1300s from the Old French verb soupleer, itself descended from the Latin supplere, meaning literally 'to fill up' or 'to complete'. That Latin verb joins sub, meaning 'up from below', with plere, meaning 'to fill', the same root that gives us 'complete' and 'plenty'. The original idea was of filling a gap or making up a shortfall, which is still felt today when a business supplies what a customer lacks. The agent ending -er, a long-standing English suffix for 'a person or thing that performs an action', turned the verb into a noun for whoever does the supplying. The spelling trap is the ending: because the base verb ends in -y, that y switches to i before -er, giving supplier rather than the wrongly imagined 'supplyer'.
How the word is built
- supply (from Latin supplere: to fill up, complete)
- -er (agent suffix: one who does)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.