Other forms: subsidiaries
A subsidiary is a company that another, bigger company owns and controls. The bank on the corner belongs to a subsidiary, which belongs to a group, which answers to a head office in another country.
The company doing the owning is the parent, and a wholly owned subsidiary is one the parent owns outright. The word is an adjective too, and that is where it turns up in essays and reports: subsidiary means secondary and supporting, of less weight — a subsidiary question, a subsidiary role, subsidiary evidence. As an adjective it takes TO: subsidiary TO the main argument. Keep it apart from subsidy, which is money a government pays to hold a price down; the two look alike and share nothing else. The plural is subsidiaries.
1nounsubsidiaryA company owned and controlled by a larger company.~85%
“The airline is a subsidiary of a shipping group.”
2adjectivesecondaryLess important than, and supporting, something else.~15%
“That is a subsidiary question; we can come back to it later.”
synonyms: secondary, supporting
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 40 sentences found in the wild and placed 40 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
subsidiary is a company.
Subsidiary comes from Middle French subsidiaire and Latin subsidiarius, which meant belonging to a reserve — the Roman troops held back behind the line, ready to be sent in. Both modern senses rest on that picture: the argument you keep in reserve, and the company standing behind the parent.
Latin
subsidiarius — belonging to a reserve
Middle French
subsidiaire
English, today
subsidiary
From Middle French subsidiaire, from Latin subsidiarius (“belonging to a reserve”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA