sale
/seɪl
/- Some money from every sale goes towards the efforts of the Band Aid Trust in Africa.
- Money from each book sale will go to the Alice Rose Trust which supports sick children.
- Privatization without flotation on the stock market means either a management buy-out or sale by tender.
Synonyms
- The overall annual quantity of our beef sales to Egypt when translated into live cattle equivalent amounts to 450,000 animals.
- But when prices fall, sales generally increase, offsetting some of the decrease in revenue.
- The fear is that corporate profits have been boosted by cost cutting, not increased sales and prices from a revival of the economy.
- We play but a support role in the most important aspect of the promotional products business: sales.
- Each of these groups has its own business manager, sales manager and product development manager.
- The retail sales report can be compared to the sales activity of a publicly traded company.
- The average price recorded from the time the sales started in the period under review was $1.89 per kilogramme.
- Then (this is one from earlier today) I might be asked to choose a date for a chain of shops to start their sales.
- There are long, lingering closing down sales at the two rental shops nearest to my flat, and the local Blockbuster is emptier every time I go there.
Synonyms
- She regularly holds sales and other fundraising events and has raised thousands of pounds.
- Half of the total has been collected from auctions, sales, coffee mornings and other events at the church in Otley Road.
- The next fundraising event is an indoor sale to be held at Melksham Labour Club on February 22.
Phrases
(up) for sale
on sale
sale or return
Origin
Late Old English sala, from Old Norse sala, of Germanic origin; related to sell.
sell from Old English:
An Old English word that originally meant ‘to give, hand over in response to a request’. The longer version of the expression sell your soul, ‘to do absolutely anything to achieve your objective’, is sell your soul to the devil. Over the centuries various people reputedly agreed to give their soul to the devil if in return he would grant them all their heart's desires in this life. The most famous person alleged to have made such a pact was the 16th-century German astronomer and necromancer Faust, whose story inspired Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, and gives us the expression Faustian (late 19th century) as in Faustian pact. Sale (Old English) comes via Old Norse from the same Germanic root as sell. Use of the word for selling goods at a lower price than before dates from the mid 19th century.