logistics
- 1The process of planning, carrying out and controlling the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods, services and related information from origin to point of use, to meet customers' needs.
She left teaching for a job with a logistics company that runs warehouses across the Midwest.
The retailer rebuilt its logistics around regional distribution centers to speed up deliveries.
Note
In business the word names a whole field, and it keeps its -s even when it modifies another noun: a logistics company, logistics management. It has also spread to the practical arrangements of any undertaking, so people handle the logistics of a trip or a conference, and the logistics of an operation can take careful planning.
- 2The military work of obtaining equipment, facilities, and personnel, providing their supplies and upkeep, and arranging their transportation.
The general knew the campaign would be decided by logistics rather than by any single battle.
Officers in charge of logistics arranged fuel, spare parts and transport for twenty thousand troops.
Note
The military meaning keeps the word's origin in view. Antoine-Henri Jomini coined or popularized French logistique in 1830 from logis, a lodging place, the root of the title maréchal des logis, "marshal of lodging." Quartering troops has since grown into everything that keeps a force supplied and moving; a supply line is one strand of it, the route that support travels along.
- 3Plural of logistic.
Note
A plural that belongs to mathematics: only the countable logistic, a logistic function or its curve, can be counted, so researchers fit two or three logistics to a set of data. The obsolete senses for the art of calculation and sexagesimal arithmetic were never counted. In print it looks exactly like the supply-chain field, a separate noun that is not the plural of anything.
logistics is a form of logistic
logistic, noun: In mathematics, a function of the logistic type, or a graph showing a logistic curve. Full entry
- Forms
- logisticlogistics plural
- Spelling
- logistic → logistics: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Practice
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Origin
From French logistique, coined or popularized in 1830 by Antoine-Henri Jomini from logis, "lodging place", as in maréchal des logis, "marshal of lodging". It was possibly influenced by the existing mathematical term logistique, of Ancient Greek origin.