IPO

American  

abbreviation

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

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IPO British  

abbreviation

1. independent publicly owned company

2. stock exchange initial public offering

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IPO Cultural  

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

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Etymology

Origin of IPO

First recorded in 1975–80

Example Sentences

The IPO is a component of a single offering which includes Pershing Square USA, Ltd., the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 23, 2026

Pershing Square Inc. said shares will be issued only to the initial investors in the Pershing Square USA IPO.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 23, 2026

The AI deal precedes SpaceX’s trillion-dollar IPO, following $16 billion in sales and over 60% profit margin last year.

From Barron's • Apr. 22, 2026

Musk is raising money in an IPO partly to finance space-based AI computing he hopes will become cheaper than terrestrial data centers in only a few years.

From Barron's • Apr. 21, 2026

It is estimated that a person who invested $5,000 in Netflix at its 2002 IPO would have about $30,000 by January 2010, about $200,000 by January 2015, and about $1.4 million by January 2020.

From "The First State of Being" by Erin Entrada Kelly