Word of the Day:
capitalism
What It Means
A socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit.
An economic system based on private control of the means of production and the exploitation of labour by capital.
An economic system based on private property and the abstraction of resources into the form of privately owned capital, with economic decisions made largely through the operation of a market unregulated by the state.
Capitalism in Context
“The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small business-man is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and...”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from French capitalisme (“the condition of one who is rich”); equivalent to capital + -ism. Derived from Proto-Indo-European *káput (“head”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kap-. First used in English by novelist William Thackeray in The Newcomes [1854-1855].
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: capitalism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “capitalism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/capitalism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
