Other forms: trademarks, trademarked
A trademark is the name or symbol that one company alone is allowed to use. The bitten apple, the swoosh on a shoe, the exact red on a can of Coca-Cola.
It is a legal thing: you register a trademark, you own it, and you can sue somebody who infringes it. The small mark after a name matters — TM means someone is claiming it, R in a circle means it has been registered. Keep the three protections apart, because learners mix them constantly: a trademark protects a name or a logo, a patent protects an invention, and a copyright protects a text, a song or a picture. The everyday use has nothing to do with lawyers — your trademark is the thing you always do, so a trademark grey scarf, a trademark shrug, a trademark opening line. There is a verb as well: companies trademark a name before a launch.
1nountrademarkA name, word or symbol that only one company may legally use.
“The shape of the bottle is a registered trademark.”
2nounfeatureA feature that a person is known for and does again and again.
“Long silences were a trademark of his interviews.”
3adjectivecharacteristicCharacteristic of one particular person.
“She answered with her trademark shrug and said nothing.”
4verbregisterTo register a name or symbol as a trademark.
“They trademarked the logo months before the launch.”
trademark is a legally protected name or symbol.
Trademark is trade plus mark — the mark that says who made a thing and put it up for sale. Both halves are plain old English words, which is why the compound says exactly what it is with no help from anywhere else.
From trade + mark.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Crime & Law