capital
Forms
- Plural
- capitals
Definitions
1.Money and wealth: the means to acquire or produce goods and services, especially in a non-barter system.
- He does not have enough capital to start a business.
2.Already-produced durable goods available for use as a factor of production, such as tools and bulldozers (equipment) and office buildings (structures).
- He pointed out that it takes both labour and capital to produce goods.
3.The capitalist class; investors considered collectively with respect to their societal (economic, political, cultural, etc.) influence.
- He warned us darkly that capital will never be sated.
- The markets crashing symbolized capital’s discontent with the tax reforms passed.
4.A city designated as a legislative seat by the government or some other authority, often the city in which the government is located; otherwise the most important city within a country or a subdivision of it.
- Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States of America.
- The Welsh government claims that Cardiff is Europe’s youngest capital.
1.Of prime importance.
2.Chief (in a political sense, as being the seat of the general government of a state or nation).
- London and Paris are capital cities.
3.Punishable by, or involving punishment by, death.
- Some 1,600 priests were deported, for example, while the total number of capital victims of the military commissions down to 1799 was only around 150.
4.Uppercase.
- You're a genius with a capital G!
- One begins a sentence with a capital letter.
- He's dead with a capital D!
Frequency
Overall
Common· #1267
By learning goal
- Everyday conversation
- Uncommon
- General reading & writing
- Common
- Academic
- Uncommon
- Literature
- Rare
Related words
Word family
Etymology
From Middle English capital, borrowed partly from Old French capital and partly from Latin capitālis (“of the head”) (in sense “head of cattle”), from caput (“head”) (English cap) + -ālis (suffix forming adjectives). Use in trade and finance originated in Medieval economies when a common but expensive transaction involved trading heads of cattle. The noun is from the adjective. In the fourth sense, displaced native Old English hēafodburg, equivalent to head + borough (“city”).