intellectual property
Americannoun
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Law. property that results from original creative thought, as patents, copyright material, and trademarks.
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an individual product of original creative thought.
Microsoft’s Halo franchise is one of the most profitable intellectual properties in the video game industry.
noun
Etymology
Origin of intellectual property
An Americanism dating back to 1840–45
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.
They were soon joined by another Polytechnique alumnus, Thomas Wolf, a wide-ranging talent who holds a doctorate in quantum physics and also worked as an intellectual property lawyer.
From Barron's ● Sep. 3, 2026
Nutex Health said it is working to figure out whether confidential business and financial information or intellectual property was stolen in a cyberattack detected in late August.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 2, 2026
Even the smallest side characters were gifted their own spin-offs in the streaming service-boosted age of marketable intellectual property.
From Salon ● Aug. 29, 2026
The intellectual property formerly owned by Zume – more than 300 patents – was bought up, external by Miso Robotics, of California.
From BBC ● Aug. 27, 2026
It did not occur to Browne that the notion of intellectual property owed as much to Columbus as to the printing press.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
