Regrating

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Buying up provisions in bulk and reselling them in the same local market at a markup, an old practice once considered a form of profiteering
2. The old trade of purchasing food or goods in a district and selling them again nearby for a higher price to exploit shortages
3. Cornering local supplies of provisions and selling them back within the same market at inflated prices, a practice long viewed as unfair

Etymology: The word has an unexpected link to scraping. Its French ancestor, "regratter", meant "to scrape again", and the root sense is still visible in English "grate", which comes from a related idea of rubbing or scraping. The trade it names began as something quite literal: a regrater took goods bought in one place and sold them again nearby, often at a markup when food was scarce. The surface analysis "re-" plus "grate" looks plausible, but the source's point is that the link is only apparent. The "re-" of "regrate" is a prefix meaning "again", and the stem "grate" in the English verb corresponds to the French "gratter" rather than being a true relative of the word in the way the spelling suggests. So the English word is best understood as a borrowing from French, with its literal sense of repeated scraping gradually giving way to the commercial meaning of buying and reselling.

Synonyms: reselling, monopolizing