Etimology
From Middle English busines, busynes, businesse, bisynes, from Old English bisiġnes (“business, busyness”), equivalent to busy + -ness. Doublet of busyness.
noun
business (countable and uncountable, plural businesses)
(countable) A specific commercial enterprise or establishment.
(countable) A person's occupation, work, or trade.
(uncountable) Commercial, industrial, or professional activity.
(uncountable) The volume or amount of commercial trade.
(uncountable) One's dealings; patronage.
(uncountable) Private commercial interests taken collectively.
(uncountable) The management of commercial enterprises, or the study of such management.
(countable) A particular situation or activity.
(countable) Any activity or objective needing to be dealt with; especially, one of a financial or legal matter.
(uncountable) Something involving one personally.
(uncountable, parliamentary procedure) Matters that come before a body for deliberation or action.
(travel, uncountable) Business class, the class of seating provided by airlines between first class and coach.
(acting) Action carried out with a prop or piece of clothing, usually away from the focus of the scene.
(countable, rare) The collective noun for a group of ferrets.
(slang, British) Something very good; top quality. (possibly from "the bee's knees")
(slang, uncountable) The act of defecation, or the excrement itself, particularly that of a non-human animal.
(slang) Disruptive shenanigans.
(Australian Aboriginal) matters (e.g sorry business = a funeral)
Examples
Synonyms: see Thesaurus:enterprise
I left my father's business.
The ability to shift profits to low-tax countries by locating intellectual property in them, which is then licensed to related businesses in high-tax countries, is often assumed to be the preserve of high-tech companies.
He is in the motor and insurance businesses.
I'm going to Las Vegas on business.
He's such a poor cook, I can't believe he's still in business!
We do business all over the world.
Business has been slow lately.
They did nearly a million dollars of business over the long weekend.
In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%. That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters.
I shall take my business elsewhere.
This proposal will satisfy both business and labor.
Policing the relationship between government and business in a free society is difficult. Businesspeople have every right to lobby governments, and civil servants to take jobs in the private sector.
I studied business at Harvard.
This UFO stuff is a mighty strange business.
The wolde ſome mayſter perhappes clowt ye / But as for me ye nede nat doute ye / For I had leuer be without ye / Then haue ſuche beſyneſſe aboute ye.
Our principal business here is to get drunk.
Let's get down to business.
To know the naturall cause of Sense, is not very necessary to the business now in hand; and I have els-where written of the same at large.
That's none of your business.
If that concludes the announcements, we'll move on to new business.
Gates, who always flew business or coach, didn't particularly like the high air fares Nishi was charging to Microsoft, […]
The business with the hat is a fine example of the difficulty of distinguishing between 'natural' and 'formal' acting.
Synonym: fesnyng
I'm sure his goons will go through the ship like a business of ferrets, and they'll want to look in our baggage.
These new phones are the business!
Your ferret left his business all over the floor.
As the cart went by, its horse lifted its tail and did its business.
I haven't seen cartoons giving someone the business since the 1990s.
Related words
related terms
pidgin
adjective
business
Of, to, pertaining to, or used for purposes of conducting trade, commerce, governance, advocacy or other professional purposes.
Professional, businesslike, having concern for good business practice.
Supporting business, conducive to the conduct of business.
Examples
Please do not use this phone for personal calls; it is a business phone.
They are solely business instruments. Every man's relation to them is purely a business relation. His use of them is purely a business use.
With a little manœuvring they contrived to meet on the doorstep which was […] in a boiling stream of passers-by, hurrying business people speeding past in a flurry of fumes and dust in the bright haze.
[…] the fact that the injured party came to the insured premises for solely business purposes precluded any reliance on the non-business pursuits exception .
Both of these partnerships have to cope with these dual issues in a more complicated way than is the case in solely business partnerships.
He is thoroughly business, but has the happy faculty of transacting it in a genial and courteous manner.
[…] and the transaction carried through in a thoroughly business manner.
Sometimes this very subtle contrast becomes only too visible, as when in wartime Jewish business men were almost lynched because they were thoroughly business men and worked for profit.
The moral is evident: do not invest in schemes promising enormous and quick returns unless you have investigated them in a thoroughly business manner.
Amiens is a thoroughly business town, the business being chiefly with the flax-works.
According to this saga of intellectual-property misanthropy, these creatures [patent trolls] roam the business world, buying up patents and then using them to demand extravagant payouts from companies they accuse of infringing them. Often, their victims pay up rather than face the costs of a legal battle.