Word.ws English Dictionary

private equity

private equity noun: capital stock in a private company that does not offer stock to the general public.

Noun

private equity (countable and uncountable, plural private equities)

  1. Capital stock in a private company that does not offer stock to the general public.
    • That company is closely held; its equity is all private equity.
  2. An investment fund that specializes in buying companies in order to restructure and then sell them with a profit; the industry comprising such firms.
    • Although private equity is not inherently villainous, the horror stories from past takeovers give the industry a bad name, especially in cases where it assumes the mantle of landlord or hospital owner.
    • Spain’s La Liga has agreed a €2.7bn (£2.3bn) deal with CVC that could see private equity involved in the running of a large European football league for the first time.2021 August 4, Jasper Jolly, “Spain’s La Liga agrees €2.7bn deal with private equity firm CVC”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 14 Aug 2021

Examples of private equity in a sentence

  • American private equity tycoons are profiteering from the global climate crisis by investing in fossil fuels that are driving greenhouse gas emissions, a new investigation reveals.2022 February 15, Nina Lakhani, “Private equity’s dirty dozen: the 12 US firms funding dirty energy projects”, in The Guardian, archived...
  • Many have more than doubled their allocations to private equity.2022 July 7, “Private equity may be heading for a fall”, in The Economist, →ISSN, archived from the original on 01 Aug 2022:

Forms of private equity

pluralprivate equities

Questions about private equity

What does private equity mean?
Private equity means capital stock in a private company that does not offer stock to the general public.
How do you use private equity in a sentence?
American private equity tycoons are profiteering from the global climate crisis by investing in fossil fuels that are driving greenhouse gas emissions, a new investigation reveals.
What part of speech is private equity?
Private equity is a noun.
What is the plural of private equity?
The plural of private equity is private equities.

Words near private equity in the dictionary

  1. private enterprise
  2. private enterprise number
  3. private enterprise numbers
  4. private enterprises
  5. private equities
  6. private equity
  7. private eye
  8. private eyes
  9. private first class
  10. private good
  11. private goods

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: private equity (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: “private equity.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/private_equity. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.