market
Pluralmarkets
Verbmarkets, marketing, marketed
Pluralmarkets
Formsmarkets, marketing, marketed
- 1A place, or a gathering held there on regular days, where traders sell food and other goods from stalls to buyers.
Vendors at the open-air market were arranging their produce before sunrise.
The old covered market downtown has housed the same stalls for decades.
UsagePeople usually shop at the market; on the market means for sale: a house on the market.
Similarmarketplace
Note
The word names both the place and the trading held there, and it can mark a site's past as well as its present: a spot 'used to be the market, until it was redeveloped.' A qualifier can name what changes hands, as in the 'swag market' of Margery Allingham's The China Governess (1963).
- 2The people, or the country or region, that buy or might buy a particular product or service.
Streaming services compete for the same market of young urban viewers.
Their market consists mainly of small business owners who need simple accounting tools.
UsageUsually a market for something: the market for electric cars. A firm enters a new market.
Note
The market here is the customers, or the area where they are found. John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848) ties the question of how a market can be created for produce to the overproduction theory it rejects. Used of a region, it names a territory where demand exists, as when a firm enters the Asian market.
- 3To offer a product or service for sale, especially by promoting it to the people who might buy it.
The studio plans to market the film as a family comedy.
Startups often market their apps through social media influencers.
UsageYou market something to a group: market the film to families. Spelling: marketed, marketing, one t.
Note
The promotional verb of business covers the work done before and around a sale: a firm can 'plan to market' a product it has not yet sold at all. It can also mean simply to sell, as when a farm markets its eggs locally.
- 4An organized system, sometimes monopolistic, through which particular goods or assets are traded.
Trading on the commodities market was halted after prices swung wildly.
The bond market reacted sharply to the central bank's announcement.
UsageThings are traded on a market: shares on the stock market.
Similarexchange
Note
Organized trading takes its name from what is traded: the stock market, the bond market, the commodities market. Such a market runs on rules, and sometimes one seller controls it as a monopoly. The opposite imbalance is a monopsony, a market dominated by a single buyer. Control of a market can sit on either side of the trade.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Organized trading markets operate under rules. sec.gov
- A monopoly can place a market under a single seller's control. stlouisfed.org
- A monopsony is the corresponding market structure with a single buyer. stlouisfed.org
- Market control can occur on either the buying or selling side. ftc.gov
- 5Commerce as a whole, understood as a mechanism that lets supply and demand rather than the state determine prices.
Economists argued that the market, not lawmakers, should set the price of electricity.
Critics warn that leaving health care entirely to the market will price out poorer families.
UsageUsually the market, often as if it acts: the market decides; also free markets, market forces.
- 6The total volume of trade carried out in a particular commodity or product.
The global smartphone market shrank as buyers held onto older devices longer.
Analysts estimate the market in rare earth metals at several billion dollars a year.
Similartrade
- 7A shop that sells food and household groceries, from a supermarket to a corner convenience store.
The little market on our block stays open until midnight, which is handy when we run out of milk or paper towels.
The market on Fifth Street carries imported cheeses the big chains don't stock.
- 8The price a thing fetches when sold; hence, its value or worth.
She sold her shares at market rather than wait for a better price.
He refused to sell below the current market, no matter how the buyer pressed.
UsageMostly in set phrases: at market, below market, above market, market value.
Note
Price slides easily into worth. In Hamlet, the prince asks what a man is if the 'chief good and market of his time' is only to sleep and feed. Market here means what one's hours are spent for.
Less common meaning
- 9To buy or sell at a market, especially to shop there for food and household supplies.
Before there were supermarkets, she would go marketing at dawn, moving from stall to stall with a list in her apron pocket.
On Saturdays the whole family went marketing together, haggling over fruit and coming home with far more than they needed.
UsageUsually in go marketing: she went marketing on Saturdays.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
Latin merx ('wares, merchandise') gave mercor ('I trade, buy') and then mercātus ('trade, market'), the ultimate source of late Old English market and Anglo-Norman markiet (Old French marchié), which fed into Middle English market, perhaps with Old Saxon markat or Old Norse markaðr.