Workforce

How to spell workforce

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce workforce

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does workforce mean?

1. nounThe total number of people employed by a particular organisation or available for work in a region or economy.

Workforce in a sentence

• The factory cut its workforce by nearly a third during the downturn.

• An ageing workforce means the company must recruit younger staff soon.

Where does workforce come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent modern compound, joining two very old English words. 'Work' descends from the Old English 'weorc', meaning labour, toil, or a deed done, a word with cousins across the Germanic languages. 'Force', by contrast, came into English through Old French 'force' from the Latin 'fortis', meaning 'strong', and it carried the sense of a body of armed people before being extended to any organised group, as in 'police force'. The combined term 'workforce', meaning the body of people available for or engaged in work, took shape in the twentieth century as industry and economics needed a single word for a company's or a nation's pool of labour. Because both halves are common, the spelling rarely trips people up; the only mild question is whether to write it as one word, two words, or with a hyphen, and modern usage settles firmly on the single solid form.

How the word is built

• work (labour, effort)
• force (a body of people)