consortium
noun
Simple meaning
An association or combination of businesses, financial institutions.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
kuhnsawrsheeuhmSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
kənˈsɔɹʃiəm
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
An association or combination of businesses, financial institutions, or investors, for the purpose of engaging in a joint venture.
An association of companies for some definite purpose
An association or society.
A similar arrangement among non-commercial institutions or organizations.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: An association or combination of businesses, financial institutions, or investors, for the purpose of engaging in a joint venture.
Used this way, consortium is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a financial use: it has a settled meaning in accounting and business, where precision matters more than colour.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Finance/economics
- Business/professional
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use consortium
- “Several universities formed a consortium to conduct the research.”
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More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: association or combination of businesses or financial institutions
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.