consumer
Pluralconsumers
- 1A person who buys goods or services for their own use rather than to resell them, or such buyers considered as a group.
The average consumer spends noticeably more during holiday sales.
Consumers responded quickly to the sudden price cuts.
UsageOften before another noun: consumer spending, consumer goods, consumer protection.
Oppositesupplier
Note
Economics defines this consumer by position. It is the last link in the chain, the one who buys in order to use rather than to make or resell, so its natural opposite is producer, and a system can favor one over the other.
- 2Any person or thing that uses up, eats, or destroys something.
This factory is the largest consumer of electricity in the region.
Modern data centers are voracious consumers of energy.
UsageUsually with of and often an adjective: the largest consumer of electricity, a heavy consumer of fuel.
Similaruser
Note
The broad sense that the specialist ones narrow from, built plainly from consume + -er. It covers things as readily as people, and it usually takes of plus whatever gets used up. It suits industry well: Edwin Black's Internal Combustion (2006) calls the brewers, bakers, tilemakers and glassblowers of 1200s London hour-to-hour consumers, with charcoal as the fuel they burned through.
Checked 7 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- Consumer is formed from consume + -er. en.wiktionary.org
- Edwin Black wrote Internal Combustion, first published in 2006. openlibrary.org
- Black describes the named trades in 1200s London as hour-to-hour consumers of charcoal. en.wiktionary.org
- 3An organism that feeds on other organisms to obtain energy, rather than producing its own food.
In a food web, a fox acts as a consumer that preys on smaller animals.
Primary consumers eat plants, while secondary consumers eat other animals.
Oppositeproducer
Note
Ecology's everyday name for a heterotroph, an organism that cannot make its own food and must take it from other living things or their remains. Like the economic sense, it is defined against producer, but here the producers are organisms that make their own food, not makers of goods. Heterotroph is the more exact technical term, and consumer is the word used when describing roles in a food web.
Checked 7 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- An ecological consumer is a heterotroph. en.wikipedia.org
- Heterotrophs require externally supplied organic carbon; their energy need not come from other organisms. Photoheterotrophs use light for energy. en.wikipedia.org
- Ecological producers are organisms that make their own food. education.nationalgeographic.org
Practice
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Origin
Formed from the verb consume plus the suffix -er.
Checked 7 Nov 2026 · 1 fact
- Consumer was formed from consume plus the suffix -er. en.wiktionary.org