Wholesale

How to spell wholesale

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wholesale

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wholesale mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the sale of goods in large quantities to retailers rather than directly to the public.
2. adjectiveDone on a large scale and without discrimination; extensive and total.

Wholesale in a sentence

• The warehouse offers wholesale prices to shops that buy in bulk.

• The new director made wholesale changes to the entire department.

• He runs a wholesale business supplying flour to bakeries across the region.

• The storm caused wholesale destruction across the coastal towns.

Where does wholesale come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word formed in late Middle English from the phrase 'by whole sale', meaning a sale of goods in large, undivided quantities rather than in small pieces. The first element, 'whole', comes from the Old English 'hal', which meant 'healthy, entire, uninjured', the same root that gives us 'hale' and 'heal'; the silent 'w' at the front was added in spelling around the fifteenth century and never reflected the pronunciation, which is exactly where modern writers can stumble. The second element, 'sale', descends from Old English 'sala', reinforced by the Old Norse 'sala', meaning the act of selling. By the 1400s the two words had fused into a single trade term contrasting with 'retail', which kept goods broken into small lots. From the commercial meaning the word later spread into a figurative sense of doing something on a sweeping, indiscriminate scale, as in 'wholesale changes'.

How the word is built

• whole (entire, in bulk)
• sale (act of selling)