entrepreneurial
Americanadjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of entrepreneurial
Explanation
You can call someone willing to take financial risks in new ventures entrepreneurial. Caught up in the entrepreneurial spirit, you felt like a modern-day pioneer braving the wild frontier of business. Then you ran out of lemonade. Entrepreneurial is the adjective form of the noun "entrepreneur," someone investing in risky financial situations. The base noun can be traced to the Latin prendere, "to take," and the 19th Century French entrepreneur, "one who undertakes or manages." It often involves a risky undertaking, however, including the possibility of losing everything. The 19th-Century English Physicist Michael Faraday once broke it down this way: “The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.”
Vocabulary lists containing entrepreneurial
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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.
“That would signal something bad for the American entrepreneurial ecosystem that has set us apart for so long,” he told MarketWatch.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 20, 2026
Is such entrepreneurial go-getting to be applauded, or is it excessive youthful chutzpah?
From BBC ● Sep. 2, 2026
Dolly’s final public appearance came in June when, true to her entrepreneurial form, she appeared at the opening of Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop, a Southern-friend truck stop designed to compete with the popular chain Buc-ee’s.
From Salon ● Aug. 26, 2026
Our critic noted that the show “posits that the Dutch brought with them the business-friendly entrepreneurial attitudes that helped make New York the center of commerce and capitalism it remains today.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 23, 2026
To support his family, Loren tried a series of entrepreneurial ventures, none of them very successful.
From "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
