Synonyms

IPO

American

abbreviation

initial public offering: a company's first stock offering to the public.

IPO British

abbreviation

independent publicly owned company
stock exchange initial public offering

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

IPO Cultural

Abbreviation for i nitial p ublic o ffering; the first issuance of shares in itself by a public company.

Etymology

Origin of IPO

First recorded in 1975–80

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

SpaceX, for its part, is valued at about $1.3 trillion and is planning a record-setting IPO for midyear.

From Barron's • Apr. 10, 2026

No. After the IPO, I continued to work and live in the same place until I moved to New York City two decades later.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 10, 2026

As OpenAI prepares for its IPO, the company decided to…pay millions of dollars for a tech talk show?

From Slate • Apr. 10, 2026

It could be the biggest IPO ever but it also might just be the prelude for a record-breaking merger.

From Barron's • Apr. 10, 2026

The other, he said, are American investment banks and financial services companies, which often need to prepare glossy pamphlets with graphs to illustrate the benefits of an IPO or a proposed merger.

From "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023