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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

monopoly.

A situation, by legal privilege or other agreement, in which solely one party (company, cartel etc.) exclusively provides a particular product or service, dominating that market and generally exerting powerful control over it.

8 characters4 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/məˈnɒpəli/Received-Pronunciation/məˈnɑpəli/Atlantic-Canada, General-American/məˈnɒpəli/Canada, dialectal/məˈnɔpəli/Australia
  1. A situation, by legal privilege or other agreement, in which solely one party (company, cartel etc.) exclusively provides a particular product or service, dominating that market and generally exerting powerful control over it.

  2. An exclusive control over the trade or production of a commodity or service through exclusive possession.

    A land monopoly renders its holder(s) nearly almighty in an agricultural society.
  3. The privilege granting the exclusive right to exert such control.

    Granting monopolies in concession constitutes a market-conform alternative to taxation for the state, while the crown sometimes bestowed a monopoly as an outrageous gift.
  4. The market thus controlled.

    metonymically
  5. The holder (person, company or other) of such market domination in one of the above manners.

    metonymically
Where this word comes from

From Latin monopōlium, from Ancient Greek μονοπώλιον (monopṓlion, “a right of exclusive sale”), from μόνος (mónos, “sole”) + πωλέω (pōléō, “to barter, sell”). By surface analysis, mono- + -poly.

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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.