mercantile
adjective
Simple meaning
Concerned with the exchange of goods for profit.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
murkuhntylSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈmɝkəntaɪl
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.
adjective
economics
Concerned with the exchange of goods for profit.
economics
Of or relating to the economic system of mercantilism
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C1 · Advanced (estimated)
- Frequency
- Uncommon
- Typical Use
- Primarily written
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Concerned with the exchange of goods for profit.
Used this way, mercantile is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in finance or economics contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- No strong connotation
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Finance/economics
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use mercantile
- “Mercantile theories.”adjective
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
An organization that provides businesses with credit ratings of other firms.
A place of business for retailing goods.
The body of rules applied to commercial transactions.
An economic system (Europe in 18th century) to increase a nation's wealth by government regulation of all of the nation's commercial interests.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
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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.