Other forms: products
A product is something made to be sold — the boxes along the shelf, the shampoo, the phone in your hand. A supermarket carries forty thousand products; the bakery on the corner carries six.
Product stretches to services and software, and the people who plan them sit in a product team under a product manager. Two exact senses run alongside the shop one: in maths the product is what you get by multiplying, so the product of 6 and 7 is 42, and in chemistry the products are what comes out of a reaction, written on the right of the arrow. There is the human use as well — he is a product of a small town and a large family — where what made him is the whole point. Do not mix it with produce: PROD-uce is fruit and vegetables, pro-DUCE is the verb, and the product is what comes out at the end.
1nounproductA thing made or grown to be sold.~59%
“The shop stocks about two hundred products.”
synonyms: goods, item
2nounresultThe result of a process, or of the conditions that shaped it.~9%
“He is a product of a small town and a large family.”
3nounmathsIn maths, the number you get by multiplying two numbers together.~28%
“The product of 6 and 7 is 42.”
4nounchemistryIn chemistry, a substance that comes out of a reaction.~4%
“Water is a product of burning hydrogen.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 140 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin prōductus is led forth, the participle of prōdūcō, which is prō, forward, plus dūcō, to lead. A product is what has been led out into the open. In English it started as a piece of arithmetic — the number two others lead to — and only afterwards went onto the shelf.
Latin
prōductus
Middle English
product
English, today
product
From Middle English product, from Latin prōductus. From Middle English product, from Latin prōductus, perfect participle of prōdūcō, first attested in English in the mathematics sense.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA