transaction
Pluraltransactions
- 1
- 2An exchange or trade of things such as ideas, money, or goods.
The conversation became a transaction of ideas, each scholar offering a new perspective.
Bartering is really a transaction without money changing hands.
Similarexchange, trade, interchange
- 3The movement of money into, out of, or between accounts.
The bank flagged a suspicious transaction on her debit card.
Online transactions are usually processed within seconds.
Note
Banking gives the word its most familiar countable use. Every card payment, deposit or withdrawal is a transaction, posted to an account as a debit or a credit and reconciled against the running balance. Statements list transactions line by line, which is why the word here is freely plural in a way the act of conducting business rarely is.
- 4Putting plans into effect or conducting business or negotiations.
The transaction of government affairs requires careful record-keeping.
She handled the transaction of the negotiations with great skill.
Similarconduct, handling, management, execution
Note
The broadest sense of the word, carried into English through Middle French and Old French transaccion from Late Latin transactio. Here it names the doing rather than the deal, so it usually takes of and resists a plural: the transaction of business, the transaction of public affairs. Once you can count them, you have moved to the deal itself.
- 5An operation that is guaranteed to complete entirely or not at all, such as a single database update.
The database wrapped the update in a transaction so a crash could not corrupt the records.
If any step fails, the entire transaction is rolled back.
Note
Computing borrows the word for an all-or-nothing unit of work. A transaction either commits, making every change at once, or rolls back, leaving the data exactly as it was, so a failure partway through never leaves things half-done. That is what atomic means here: indivisible, not small. Programmers speak of beginning, committing and rolling back a transaction.
- 6A unit of social interaction, such as an exchange between two people in conversation.
The therapist examined each transaction between the couple for hidden meaning.
A friendly greeting and a warm reply make up a simple transaction.
Similarexchange, interaction, encounter
Note
In transactional analysis the word becomes the basic unit of conversation: one person's stimulus and another's response make a single transaction, and the analyst reads each one for the ego states behind it. The everyday idea of exchange still echoes here, since something is offered and something returned, but nothing changes hands except words and attention.
- 7A written account of the discussions and other proceedings at meetings of a learned society.
Her findings appeared in an early transaction of the learned society.
Nineteenth-century transactions recorded debates that shaped modern science.
Similarproceedings, journal, record
Note
A learned society's published record, and almost always a plural word: a society's transactions are its volumes of papers and proceedings, issued periodically for members and libraries. The singular is rare in this use, so most readers who meet a lone transaction will hear the business meaning first.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Middle French transaction, which came from Old French transaccion, ultimately from Late Latin transactio.