Purchasers

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Parties involved in the act of buying items or services in return for compensation
2. Consumers engaged in the procurement of commodities or services by trading currency
3. Individuals or groups who acquire products or services through payment

Etymology: "Purchasers" is the plural of "purchaser", and the word itself is a straightforward formation: the noun "purchase" with the agent suffix "-er" added, so a purchaser is one who purchases. The interesting part is the first half. "Purchase" came into English from Old French, where "purchacier" meant to pursue or seek to obtain something, and the sense of buying developed from that idea of chasing a thing down. The ending has a longer ancestry than the base word. The suffix "-er" descends from Latin "-arius", which turned up in countless agent nouns, and it passed into Old English as "-ere" and then into Middle English as "-er". English thus took the same suffix twice over, once through the Germanic inheritance and once through French, and the two streams merged into the single ending we use today.

Synonyms: buyers, customers, clients, consumers, shoppers

Antonyms: sellers, vendors, suppliers