Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Monopoly
/məˈnɒpəli/noun
Exclusive control of the supply of a good or service.
The Greek roots
μόνος
mónos
single, alone
πωλεῖν
pōleîn
to sell
Literally: “selling alone”
The story of the word
Aristotle uses μονοπώλιον in the Politics to tell the story of Thales, who read the coming olive harvest, hired every press in Miletus and Chios cheaply in winter, then named his own price at picking time. The moral was that philosophers could be rich if they cared to be. English borrowed the word in the sixteenth century for royal grants of exclusive trade, the abuse that produced the Statute of Monopolies in 1624, three centuries before the board game.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
monotonymonkmonolitholigopoly
In a sentence
For thirty years one firm had a monopoly on the ferry route.
The regulator broke the monopoly by forcing the network open to rivals.