productivity
- 1The rate at which a standard group of workers turns out goods or services, together with their overall degree of efficiency.
Economists tracked productivity across the manufacturing sector throughout the decade.
The firm invested in training to boost worker productivity.
Similarefficiency, output, performance
Oppositeinefficiency
Note
The measured version of the word: a number, not a virtue. Richard Partington, writing in 2025, calls it a metric of output for each hour of work. It travels in fixed company, as in productivity growth and productivity statistics. The quip that the computer age shows up everywhere but in the productivity statistics plays on the gap between the everyday sense of efficiency and what the figures actually record.
- 2The quality or condition of being able to produce abundantly, grow well, or work efficiently.
The soil's productivity made the valley ideal for farming.
Remote work changed how managers think about employee productivity.
Similarproductiveness
Oppositeinefficiency
- 3
- 4The ability to form new words from established patterns and parts, such as the suffixes -ness and -ity, and the degree to which such formation actually happens.
Linguists noted the high productivity of '-able' in forming new adjectives.
The productivity of certain prefixes varies from one period to another.
Note
Linguists use it to separate the living parts of word-building from the fossilized ones. A productive suffix attaches freely to new bases. An unproductive one survives only in words already made. The word itself shows the idea at work: it is productive plus -ity, and its synonym productiveness reaches the same meaning with -ness. Two live suffixes compete for one base.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from "productive" combined with the suffix "-ity."