Definition of entrepreneur
: one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise
From the M-W Editors
Recent Examples of entrepreneur from the Web
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Like the gold miners who scoured the same Northern California hills 150 years ago, marijuana entrepreneurs have come hoping to gain great fortunes.
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A $1 million grant from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation to support entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds in Chicago will go to major players 1871 and UI Labs as well as specialty groups Blue1647, Bunker Labs and i.c.
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Olivier Coste, a French entrepreneur living in New York since 2014, voted for Macron and intends to vote for Lescure.
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HigherDOSE opened in 2016 and comes to us from Lauren Berlingeri, a holistic nutritionist and health coach, and Katie Kaps, a startup executive and entrepreneur.
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A handful of entrepreneurs have quietly formed communist Cuba’s first private small business association, testing the government’s willingness to allow Cubans to organize outside the strict bounds of state control.
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Champion-Cain, an unsinkable Mission Hills entrepreneur with a large business footprint in San Diego, stepped up and volunteered to donate the seed money for the Friends to lease and run the course.
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An Auburn inventor and a team of entrepreneurs are marketing a product that will be good news to tennis players with backaches the world over.
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Meanwhile, Willis continued to portray himself as a successful entrepreneur.
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'entrepreneur'. Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
The Characteristics of an entrepreneur
You might well wonder whether entrepreneur simply means “a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money” or whether it carries an additional connotation of far-sightedness and innovation. The answer, perhaps unsatisfyingly, is that it can go in either direction.
Entrepreneur has been in used in English to refer to a kind of businessman since at least the middle of the 18th century, when it appeared in translation of the King of Prussia’s instructions for his generals (“. . . if the country happens not to abound in forage, you must agree with some Entrepreneur for the quantity required.”). During the 19th century, it was also used of a go-between or a person who undertakes any kind of activity (as opposed to just a business).
By the early 20th century entrepreneur appears to have taken on the connotation of go-getter when applied to an independent business owner, a quality that may also be found in the phrase entrepreneurial spirit, which began being used at about the same time.
Origin and Etymology of entrepreneur
French, from Old French, from entreprendre to undertake — more at enterprise
First Known Use: 1762
Other Business Terms
ENTREPRENEUR Defined for English Language Learners
entrepreneur
playDefinition of entrepreneur for English Language Learners
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: a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money
Learn More about entrepreneur
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See words that rhyme with entrepreneur Spanish Central: Translation of entrepreneur Nglish: Translation of entrepreneur for Spanish speakers Britannica English: Translation of entrepreneur for Arabic speakers Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about entrepreneur
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