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salesmanship

nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,734 of 15,258neutral

Salesmanship is skill at persuading people to buy. Fine salesmanship, sheer salesmanship, a masterpiece of salesmanship.

It is admired as a craft and distrusted as a technique at the same time, which is why the word can be praise or accusation. The best of it is understood as finding out what somebody actually needs.

Definitions of salesmanship

  1. 1nounsalesmanshipSkill at persuading people to buy.C1

    “It took some clever salesmanship to persuade them to buy such an old car.”

salesmanship is a skill.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *skey-

  2. Middle English

    schip

  3. English

    ship

  4. English, today

    salesmanship

From salesman + -ship. ship comes from Middle English schip. From Middle English chip, schepe, schip, schup, scip, scippe, ship, shup, ssip, from Old English sċip, sċyp, from Proto-West Germanic skip, from Proto-Germanic skipą (“ship; tub, vessel”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European skey- (“to split”). More at shift. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

salesmanship in the wild

  • Dale Carnegie was an American writer and teacher of courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills.

    Dale Carnegie

  • Chief among the film's subjects are movies and other entertainment; flirting, sex, and prostitution; and salesmanship and commodity culture.

    Nice Time

  • The Encyclopedia of Chicago recounts one of his more successful acts of salesmanship: "Moody, the salesman nonpareil, even raised the enactment of the Plan to a sacred calling.

    Chicago Plan Commission

  • Stacy directed the education and personnel programs at the Dayton Company in Minneapolis, where she developed one of the first formal salesmanship training schools in the United States.

    Ima Winchell Stacy

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • salesman