cartel.
A group of businesses or nations that collude to limit competition within an industry or market.
Meaning & usage
A group of businesses or nations that collude to limit competition within an industry or market.
oil cartel
drug cartel
A combination of political groups (notably parties) for common action.
A written letter of defiance or challenge.
An official agreement concerning the exchange of prisoners.
A ship used to negotiate with an enemy in time of war, and to exchange prisoners.
Where this word comes from
In the business sense, borrowed from German Kartell, first used by Eugen Richter in 1871 in the Reichstag. In the political sense, which was the vehicle for this metaphor, the English sense, like the German sense, was borrowed from French cartel in the sixteenth century, from Italian cartello, diminutive of carta (“card, page”), from Latin charta.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.