Word.ws English Dictionary

gift economy

gift economy noun: a traditional economy where valuable goods are not traded or sold, but rather given away, sometimes with the expectation that they (or goods of equivalent or higher value) will later be given back.

Noun

gift economy (plural gift economies)

  1. A traditional economy where valuable goods are not traded or sold, but rather given away, sometimes with the expectation that they (or goods of equivalent or higher value) will later be given back.
    • Community activists will increasingly use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi-tech ‘gift economy’ in which information is freely exchanged between participants.1995 September, Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology”, in Mute, volume 1, number 3, →ISSN, archived from the original on 19 Oct 2021

Forms of gift economy

pluralgift economies

Questions about gift economy

What does gift economy mean?
Gift economy means a traditional economy where valuable goods are not traded or sold, but rather given away, sometimes with the expectation that they (or goods of equivalent or higher value) will later be given back.
What part of speech is gift economy?
Gift economy is a noun.
What is the plural of gift economy?
The plural of gift economy is gift economies.

Words near gift economy in the dictionary

  1. gift card
  2. gift cards
  3. gift certificate
  4. gift certificates
  5. gift economies
  6. gift economy
  7. gift from above
  8. gift from heaven
  9. gift from the goddesses
  10. gift from the gods
  11. gift from the heavens

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gift economy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “gift economy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gift_economy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.