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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

purveyor.

One who purveys (“furnishes, provides; gets, procures”); a supplier; specifically, one in the business of supplying food or other necessary material goods; a provisioner.

8 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/pə(ː)ˈveɪə/Received-Pronunciation/pəɹˈveɪəɹ/General-American
  1. One who purveys (“furnishes, provides; gets, procures”); a supplier; specifically, one in the business of supplying food or other necessary material goods; a provisioner.

    The merchants are the purveyors of fine selections.
  2. One who purveys (“furnishes, provides; gets, procures”); a supplier; specifically, one in the business of supplying food or other necessary material goods; a provisioner. An officer who obtained provisions such as accommodation and food for the household of a monarch or some other high-ranking person; also, an officer in charge of obtaining provisions for an army, a city, etc.

    UK · historical
    groom purveyor    yeoman purveyor
  3. A person or group that promotes or spreads an idea, a viewpoint, etc.

    figuratively
    purveyors of false information
  4. One who arranges or prepares something; an arranger, an orchestrator, a preparer.

    obsolete
Where this word comes from

From Middle English purveiour (“one who procures or supplies necessities, provider; city, military, religious, or household employee in charge of provisions, steward; one in charge, overseer; one who goes ahead to prepare the way, forerunner; one who arranges accommodations for a traveller; (figurative) one who gathers greedily”), from Anglo-Norman purveour, Middle French pourveur, pourvoyeur, and (chiefly Northern) Old French purveour (“one who procures or supplies necessities or things in general; one who arranges or prepares something”) (modern French pourvoyeur), from porveoir, purveer, purveir (“to equip, furnish, provide, purvey; to foresee; to look at; to obtain, procure”) (modern French pourvoir) + -or (suffix forming agent nouns). Porveoir is derived from Latin prōvidēre, the present active infinitive of prōvideō (“to care for, look after; to foresee; to provide, see to”), from prō- (prefix meaning ‘before; forward’) + videō (“to see; to look out for, care for, provide, see to”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *weyd- (“to see”)). By surface analysis, purvey + -or (suffix forming agent nouns denoting people or things which do the actions denoted by the stems). Doublet of proveditor and provedore.

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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.