Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Microeconomics
/ˌmaɪkroʊˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/noun
The study of how individual households and firms make decisions and how markets clear.
The Greek roots
μικρός
mikrós
small
οἰκονομία
oikonomía
household management
Literally: “small-scale household management”
The story of the word
The prefix is a late addition to a very old word: οἰκονομία already meant running one household, so microeconomics is close to saying small small-scale management. The pair micro and macro was fixed in the 1940s, once Keynes had made the aggregate economy a separate subject. Two and a half thousand years of the word's history sit on the micro side, which makes macroeconomics the newcomer despite its size.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1940s
Same family
microscopemicrobeeconomyecology
In a sentence
Microeconomics explains why the queue at one till never stays shorter than the others.
The whole case rests on a microeconomics argument about marginal cost.