Vendors

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Parties engaged in the sale of merchandise or services to consumers
2. Entities that provide products or assistance in exchange for payment
3. People or businesses that offer goods or services for sale to others

Etymology: "Vendors" is the plural of "vendor," and the word's oldest core is a pair of Latin words meaning, roughly, "give for sale." The Latin "venum," meaning "sale" or "price," combined with "dare," "to give," and the two eventually fused into "vendere," "to sell." That verb produced the Latin "venditor," "seller," which passed into Anglo-Norman and Old French as "vendeor" before arriving in English as "vendor." The surprise is how much a single modern word preserves. The plain-sounding "vendor" carries a fossilised commercial transaction inside it: "venum dare" was once a two-word phrase describing the act of handing goods over in exchange for money, and the fusion into one verb happened gradually in Latin. English took the agent form directly from its Anglo-Norman and French routes, so the word reached us already shaped for the seller's role.

Synonyms: sellers, merchants

Antonyms: buyers