private-sector

noun

the area of the nation's economy under private rather than governmental control.

Origin:
1950–55

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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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Collins

World English Dictionary

private sector

—n
	Compare public sector the part of a country's economy that consists of privately owned enterprises

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Relevant Questions

What Is The Private Sect...

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Private-sector is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a gadget; dingus; thingumbob.

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

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American Heritage

Cultural Dictionary

private sector definition

That part of an economy in which goods and services are produced by individuals and companies as opposed to the government, which controls the public sector.

Matching Quote

"He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary, above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough."

-Henry Brooks Adams

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