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What is "commodity"

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commodity
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
commodity
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
bond/currency/commodity etc trader
▪ To the surprise of many Wall Street traders, the dollar rose yesterday.
commodity
▪ Water is a precious commodity.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
agricultural
▪ But it was a reminder the supply of agricultural commodities at reasonable prices could not be guaranteed in the short-term.
▪ For Cargill, one of the leading agricultural and commodity companies, the problem was entirely different.
▪ That cost the country the proceeds of a tobacco harvest and the income from other agricultural commodities.
basic
▪ I.B.C. trades worldwide buying and selling basic commodities such as timber, coal and cement.
▪ Most arable farmers are nothing more than basic commodity producers.
▪ In the transportation field, taxis and the most basic commodity of all, fuel, are based on unit cost prices.
composite
▪ We must also give some consideration to composite commodities.
▪ Thus the composite commodity of taking part in skiing is larger than the package holiday.
▪ In the same way as we talk about the composite commodity of sport, we can also refer to the composite price.
important
▪ Crude oil is the world's most important commodity and crude oil is priced in dollars.
▪ Jade, which was recovered from the river when its reflection was seen in the moonlight, was an important commodity.
▪ Time Time is another critically important commodity.
other
▪ But follow the financial columns and you realise this club will be bought and sold, like any other worthwhile commodity.
▪ These ships in return bring coals and lime-stone and many other commodities.
▪ In contrast to other commodities, metal futures contracts remain open at their original prices until their respective prompt dates.
▪ Do they ever take an interest in the increased prices Ulster people endure on food and other commodities compared to the mainland?
▪ A similar argument holds for any other commodity we try to tax.
▪ Moves towards free markets for farm produce and other commodities were firmly rejected.
▪ Boats were able to sail from the river Humber into the village carrying fish and other commodities.
▪ The demand for health care, it is argued, is similar to the demand for any other commodity.
particular
▪ Thus the healthy growth of a particular commodity - in this case steel - actually caused a closure.
▪ In a competitive market the bargaining power of the owner of a particular commodity is limited.
▪ All they needed was water to reconstitute them and there was definitely going to be no shortage of that particular commodity.
petty
▪ In other words, it seemed that as petty commodity traders these marketwomen were often unable even to reproduce their present conditions.
▪ Marx himself might have viewed these small-scale marketers as resembling petty commodity producers more than petty capitalists.
precious
▪ Zygotes are intrinsically more difficult-yet efficiency clearly has to be much higher, for zygotes are precious commodities.
▪ Sugar was considered a precious commodity.
▪ Breath, energy and time are precious commodities for Mr McTear.
▪ I had, in effect, convinced her that television was a precious commodity.
▪ For everyone energy is limited, a precious commodity.
▪ Hope is the most precious commodity of all.
▪ Water is a precious commodity too long taken for granted in the West.
primary
▪ Nearly all exported products were primary commodities such as palm oil and cocoa, or copper and gold.
▪ In 1986 alone, primary commodity prices fell sharply by an average of nine percent.
rare
▪ Separate offices for quiet work are a rare commodity.
▪ Maleness is a rather rare commodity at this stage.
▪ Hydrogen sulphide was probably a relatively rare commodity, even in ancient times.
▪ A lighter is a rare commodity here.
▪ Luck is a rare commodity but the harder a manager works the more he has of it.
▪ Their whistles give them power, a rare commodity among revolutionaries.
▪ When the new shops open, they also have that all too rare mainland commodity - customers - and plenty of them.
▪ But honesty is a rare commodity, especially in dreamland.
relative
▪ Hence relative scale-adjusted commodity prices and relative factor rewards provide a valid prediction of the intersectoral pattern of trade.
▪ In particular, size differences can lead to differences in relative factor rewards and scale-adjusted relative commodity prices.
▪ It remains therefore to consider relative commodity prices and relative factor rewards.
scarce
▪ Soap was a scarce commodity but he as doctor had priority.
▪ The scarcest commodity within the firm was, quite simply, time.
▪ Movie cameras have become a scarce commodity.
▪ But what about other planets, where water may be a scarce commodity?
▪ The scarcer the commodity - eg accountancy - the more the applicant will exercise his power of selection.
▪ Water is becoming a scarce and expensive commodity and the supply industry is now big business.
▪ That may be true of land-a scarce commodity on a small island-but what about pay?
valuable
▪ And get the most valuable commodity of all.
▪ In the battle for human empathy that preceded the real conflict, they were the most valuable commodity.
▪ With food a more valuable commodity here than gold, the port is a flashpoint between marauding gangs of looters and bandits.
▪ Time, as you will agree, is the most valuable commodity that we possess.
▪ So information becomes a valuable commodity, and the gathering of it a labour-intensive industry.
▪ Time is one of our most valuable commodities.
■ NOUN
broker
▪ International commodities broker Ian Spiro, 46, is still missing.
▪ Their punkish stance is probably a put-on: doubtless their dads are commodities brokers.
▪ A firm of commodity brokers sought advice from a computer consultant on the installation of a computer system.
business
▪ But making tyres is a commodity business in which economies of scale matter a lot.
▪ But government bond trading throughout Wall Street has become more of a commodity business.
culture
▪ Within commodity culture, that which is specific to photography interacts extensively with broader political and cultural issues.
▪ If we look at other photographic genres, we can also observe the way in which commodity culture has affected their development.
▪ Such is the force of commodity culture that a tasteful logo and unconnected image can sell clothes around the world.
▪ Therefore this chapter will concentrate on the way photography has been used in representing commodity culture.
▪ In this sense, from the very beginning, photographs were employed to induce desire and promote commodity culture.
exchange
▪ Other commodity exchanges said they would keep normal hours.
export
▪ The main concern of their administration was to profit from the monopoly over cinnamon, the principal export commodity.
market
▪ The bargaining processes within the Defence commodity market are often described in the media and in Parliament as vicious inter-Service infighting.
▪ A couple of wrong moves in the commodities market put his back against the wall.
▪ Both firms and workers are being coerced by the same forcemajeure of insufficient demand in the commodity market.
▪ The drives business is becoming a commodity market as most manufacturers produce devices with similar technology.
▪ They may not be rich, but they do lead dignified, autonomous lives off the rollercoaster of the commodity markets.
▪ Workers are said to be rationed in the labour market and firms are said to be rationed in the commodity market.
▪ Even the lighter stories tended to be along the lines of parrots who played the commodities market.
price
▪ The fall in commodity prices means that Third World countries must produce more to earn the same amount.
▪ In particular, size differences can lead to differences in relative factor rewards and scale-adjusted relative commodity prices.
▪ Just occasionally, however, the commodity price movements provided a window of opportunity to relax the highly protectionist policies.
▪ It remains therefore to consider relative commodity prices and relative factor rewards.
▪ After falling throughout 1989, commodity prices rallied in the first part of 1990.
▪ However, the fall was due more to commodity price rises and the strength of the dollar than any concerted national effort.
▪ But developing countries are still dependent for all their foreign currency earnings upon the fluctuations of commodity prices on the world market.
▪ There is always the chance, he says, that 1992 will produce record yields, and high commodity prices.
producer
▪ Their prices might fall, hurting commodity producers.
▪ Marx himself might have viewed these small-scale marketers as resembling petty commodity producers more than petty capitalists.
▪ Most arable farmers are nothing more than basic commodity producers.
▪ When prices fall, commodity producers can maintain profitability by cutting costs or increasing output.
production
▪ The rich world keeps the South wedded to commodity production by putting up tariff barriers to manufactured goods.
▪ And: Value emerges when we have true commodity production.
▪ Individual nuclear family units not only provide the maximum number of outlets for commodity production, but also facilitate social control.
▪ But there are then crucially different phases of commodity production.
▪ And since capitalist commodity production is spontaneous - that is, unplanned social production, they are anarchic.
trader
▪ And Mr Hemsley is first and foremost a producer-not a commodity trader.
▪ In other words, it seemed that as petty commodity traders these marketwomen were often unable even to reproduce their present conditions.
▪ They needed an internal phone system that ensured fast and reliable communications between their commodity traders across the world.
▪ That system ended when Gutfreund sold the firm to Phillips Brothers, the commodities trader, in 1981.
▪ Berg traded in commodities and provided finance for other commodity traders.
▪ The Arabs had severed relations with Salomon when it had merged with the commodity traders Phillips Brothers.
■ VERB
become
▪ Movie cameras have become a scarce commodity.
▪ And, in greater detail, he tells how rock became a mere commodity in the billion-dollar music industry.
▪ The drives business is becoming a commodity market as most manufacturers produce devices with similar technology.
▪ But government bond trading throughout Wall Street has become more of a commodity business.
▪ Silk, jade and spices became valued commodities.
▪ Networks shift privacy from the realm of morals to the marketplace; privacy becomes a commodity.
▪ Like almost everything else, adventure, danger and even death have now become commodities.
▪ Management, too, has become a commodity that is bought and sold like any other commodity in the marketplace.
buy
▪ We buy Third World commodities for a song.
▪ They stock up on financial assets such as government bonds, and the government realizes profits by spending its borrowings on buying commodities.
▪ The rich world can now buy more Third World commodities at very low prices.
produce
▪ For one thing poor countries produce similar commodities, and encouraging them to increase their exports has flooded the market.
sell
▪ The co-operatives were responsible for selling any over-produced commodity on the world market and this could be difficult.
▪ Management, too, has become a commodity that is bought and sold like any other commodity in the marketplace.
▪ Nevertheless, many Third World countries still rely heavily on selling raw material commodities as their principal source of income.
▪ Their activities result from decisions to produce, to buy, and to sell commodities and resources.
▪ Today many Third World countries remain dependent on selling their commodities to the West.
▪ In advertising terms, we are selling a commodity.
trade
▪ Berg traded in commodities and provided finance for other commodity traders.
▪ His pastimes became trading commodities on the futures market and collecting butterflies.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A lighter is a rare commodity here.
▪ But divinity is a fragile commodity.
▪ Food shopping takes time, a commodity of which most of us have precious little.
▪ He might want her as a doctor, but as a woman, it seemed, she was a disposable commodity.
▪ Most alarmingly, the show suggests that industrialism, valuing commodities above itself, promoted a ghoulish worship of death.
▪ Of course many programmes of regional co-operation exist, but unlike oil most Third World commodities are no longer essential to the West.
▪ Other commodity exchanges said they would keep normal hours.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Commodity

Commodity \Com*mod"i*ty\, n.; pl. Commodities. [F. commodit['e], fr. L. commoditas. See Commode.]

  1. Convenience; accommodation; profit; benefit; advantage; interest; commodiousness. [Obs.]

    Drawn by the commodity of a footpath.
    --B. Jonson.

    Men may seek their own commodity, yet if this were done with injury to others, it was not to be suffered.
    --Hooker.

  2. That which affords convenience, advantage, or profit, especially in commerce, including everything movable that is bought and sold (except animals), -- goods, wares, merchandise, produce of land and manufactures, etc.

  3. A parcel or quantity of goods. [Obs.]

    A commodity of brown paper and old ginger.
    --Shak.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
commodity

early 15c., "benefit, profit, welfare;" later "a convenient or useful product," from Middle French commodité "benefit, profit," from Latin commoditatem (nominative commoditas) "fitness, adaptation, convenience, advantage," from commodus "suitable, convenient" (see commode). General sense "property possession" is from c.1500.

Wiktionary
commodity

n. 1 (context obsolete English) convenience; usefulness, suitability. (15th-19th c.) 2 Anything movable (a good) that is bought and sold. (from 15th c.) 3 Something useful or valuable. (from 15th c.) 4 (context obsolete English) self-interest; personal convenience or advantage. (16th-19th c.) 5 (context economics English) raw material, agricultural and other primary products as objects of large-scale trading in specialized exchanges. 6 (context marketing English) undifferentiated goods characterized by a low profit margin, as distinguished from branded products. 7 (context Marxism English) Anything which has both a use-value and an exchange-value.

Related phrases:
WordNet
commodity

n. articles of commerce [syn: trade goods, goods]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Commodity

In economics, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Often the item is fungible. Economic commodities comprise goods and services.

Commodity (Marxism)

In classical political economy and especially Karl Marx's critique of political economy, a commodity is any good or service ("products" or "activities") produced by human labour and offered as a product for general sale on the market. Some other priced goods are also treated as commodities, e.g. human labor-power, works of art and natural resources, even though they may not be produced specifically for the market, or be non-reproducible goods.

Marx's analysis of the commodity (in German: Kaufware, i.e. merchandise, ware for sale) is intended to help solve the problem of what establishes the economic value of goods, using the labor theory of value. This problem was extensively debated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Rodbertus-Jagetzow, among others. Value and price are not equivalent terms in economics, and theorising the specific relationship of value to market price has been a challenge for both liberal and Marxist economists.

Commodity (album)

Commodity marks the fifth album from Remedy Drive. The project was funded via a Kickstarter funding campaign that enabled the band to self release the album on September 23, 2014. Remedy Drive worked with former band member Philip Zach on production.

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "commodity".

As the Commonwealth was discovering, sentient aliens were a rare commodity, at least in this section of the galaxy.

While some of the spices and eastern commodities were brought overland by caravan from Ormuz or Bassora, the greater part came by water to Jiddah.

Where local and foreign milk alike are drawn into a general plan for protecting the interstate commerce in the commodity from the interferences, burdens and obstructions, arising from excessive surplus and the social and sanitary evils of low values, the power of the Congress extends also to the local sales.

The merchants of Gautemala, likewise, shipped their commodities to Cartagena by way of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan river, for they feared to send goods across the Gulf of Honduras to Havana, because of the French and English buccaneers hanging about Cape San Antonio.

Before turning back toward the border, Dixon noticed that Cerro had a white helmet cover, a commodity in even shorter supply than the white parka.

On the one hand, marketing practices and consumer consumption are prime terrain for developing postmodernist thinking: certain postmodernist theorists, for example, see perpetual shopping and the consumption of commodities and commodified images as the paradigmatic and defining activities of postmodern experience, our collective journeys through hyperreality.

Breath was a city commodity, stored in the customhouse and sold to the licensed apothecaries who resold it in their shops.

Chemical substances and commodities, like the conspiracies, and like the dustheaps in Dickens, embody the moral defects of the society that produces them.

There was also some fatback, which Ryan guessed was another of the commodities that Claggartville traded for their whaling produce.

Boaz paid me my twelve thousand francs in ducats, and I made him my friend, as he thanked me for receiving the moneys in ducats, and he doubtless made a profit on the transaction, gold being a commodity in Holland, and all payments being made in silver or paper money.

Considered in the light of reality, a commodity Anna felt had been sorely compromised by nature over the past hours, the murderer had therefore to enter the tent before the burn, remain inside with Nims, murder him, wait out the storm with the corpse, then exit and reconstruct the tent.

The captains of their armed vessels, known by the name of guarda-costas, had made a practice of boarding and plundering British ships, on pretence of searching for contraband commodities, on which occasions they had behaved with the utmost insolence, cruelty, and rapine.

Before the French Revolution the sale of Carrots and oranges was prohibited in the Dutch markets, because of the unpopular aristocratic colour of these commodities.

It is not possible for us, at this stage of Plutonian national and industrial development, to assume the operation and servicing of vital life and community support systems, nor has the Planet Pluto Government the technical skills and facilities at this time to produce and deliver infrastructure and commodities essential for a self-sustaining economy.

It sold essentially the same commodity products anyone would expect to find in a retail jewelry environment.