Virtuous English AcademyBusiness & Commerce — B2 English Vocabulary
This B2 vocabulary list gathers 50 upper-intermediate English words about business & commerce — capital, mergers and the corporate world. Every word comes with a simple definition, its British-English pronunciation and a natural example sentence, so you learn each one in real context. When you are ready, open the flashcards to practise and remember them for good.
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Using business & commerce words in English
Corporate vocabulary contains a distinction that matters legally as well as linguistically: a shareholder owns part of the company, while a stakeholder merely has an interest in it, and the two words are constantly swapped in student writing. This list also has a false friend in liability, which is not a general word for risk, and a British-American split in overheads.
What to watch out for
Stakeholder is wider than shareholder
A shareholder owns shares and therefore part of the company. A stakeholder is anyone affected by what the company does — employees, customers, suppliers, the local community, and shareholders too. So every shareholder is a stakeholder, but most stakeholders own nothing. The distinction is the whole basis of a large area of business ethics, which is why examiners look for it.
Liability is what you owe, not what might go wrong
In accounting, liabilities are debts and obligations, sitting opposite assets on a balance sheet. In law, liability is legal responsibility for damage: limited liability caps how much owners can lose. The looser sense of a risk or a burden — he is a liability to the team — is informal and figurative. Capital, meanwhile, is uncountable in this sense: raise capital, never capitals.
Overheads, recession, and the past of forecast
British English says overheads in the plural for ongoing running costs; American English says overhead, uncountable. A recession is technically two consecutive quarters of shrinking output, while a downturn is vaguer and a depression is far deeper and longer. And forecast takes either forecast or forecasted as its past form, with the unchanged version more common in British usage.
Words learners mix up
Commercial English names things precisely because contracts depend on it. These three clusters cover how companies are structured, what the money they make is called, and who sits where in the chain between factory and customer.
What kind of company is it?
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| subsidiary | A company controlled by another. The controlling one is its parent, and the subsidiary keeps its own legal identity. | The airline is a wholly owned subsidiary. |
| conglomerate | One large group operating in several unrelated industries at once. The word implies sprawl. | A conglomerate spanning insurance, cement and television. |
| franchise | A licence to run a business under someone else’s brand and system. The outlets are owned locally, not by the brand. | She bought a coffee franchise in 2019. |
| startup | A new company built to grow fast, usually on outside investment. About stage and ambition, not size. | The startup raised capital before it had a product. |
These describe ownership, not scale — a subsidiary can be larger than its parent, and a franchise outlet is an independent business. The board is the group of directors governing any of them, and takes a singular or plural verb in British English: the board has decided or have decided.
Four words for money the business made
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| profit margin | Profit as a proportion of revenue, so always a percentage. A firm can grow sales and shrink its margin. | A profit margin of just four per cent. |
| yield | The return an investment produces, also usually as a percentage of what it cost. Noun and verb. | The bonds yield three per cent a year. |
| dividend | The share of profit actually paid out to shareholders. Countable, and a decision rather than a measurement. | The board cut the dividend for the first time. |
| surplus | What is left when income exceeds spending — or stock left unsold. Its opposite is a deficit. | The division ran a small surplus. |
Only dividend is money that leaves the company. The adjectives sort differently again: profitable states a fact about the accounts, while lucrative is warmer and suggests the returns are unusually good — a lucrative contract. Viable claims only that something can survive, which is a much lower bar than either.
Who sells to whom
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| supplier | Any business that provides goods or materials to another. The broadest term in the chain. | They dropped two suppliers after the audit. |
| wholesaler | Buys in bulk from producers and sells on to businesses, not to the public. | A wholesaler serving three hundred restaurants. |
| retailer | Sells to the end customer. The activity is retail, and the goods on sale are merchandise. | The retailer is closing forty stores. |
| clientele | The customers a business has, taken as a group. Uncountable, French in shape, and used of services more than shops. | The bar has a young clientele. |
Inventory is the stock a business is holding — American in origin but now standard in British logistics too, where the older word is stock. Procurement is the formal function of buying what an organisation needs, and logistics, though plural in form, takes a singular verb: logistics is the bottleneck.
Collocations that sound natural
Company reporting is written to a formula, and these are the pairings that formula uses. They also appear constantly in B2 reading exams, because a single phrase carries a whole financial situation.
profit margin
a narrow profit margina healthy profit marginsqueeze marginsmargins are under pressure
Margins are squeezed, eroded or under pressure — the metaphor is always compression.
audit
conduct an auditan internal auditan audit trailpass an audit
An audit trail is the record that lets someone reconstruct what happened, and the phrase has spread well beyond finance.
quota
meet a quotaexceed the quotaimpose a quotaa sales quota
bankruptcy
file for bankruptcydeclare bankruptcyon the brink of bankruptcyemerge from bankruptcy
File for is American in origin and now general. In British usage a company more often goes into administration.
patent
file a patenthold a patentpatent pendinga patent expires
British English says PAY-tent; American English says PAT-ent. Both are correct in their own variety.
portfolio
a diverse portfolioa portfolio of brandsmanage a portfolioportfolio of clients
Formal, neutral or informal?
Commercial vocabulary contains one plural-only noun that catches almost everyone, a set of manufactured verbs, and several words whose formality is easy to misjudge in a job application.
- premisesPlural onlyThe buildings a business occupies, and it has no singular: the premises are secure, never a premise. A premise is a completely different word meaning an assumption in an argument — the two are unrelated despite the spelling.
- fiscalFormalRelating to government revenue and spending: fiscal policy, a fiscal deficit. Note that the American fiscal year is the British financial year, and the British tax year does not start in January.
- monetise / commercialiseJargon · -iseManufactured verbs meaning to make money from something and to turn it into a business. Standard inside companies, still faintly disliked outside them. British English spells both with -ise.
- downsizeEuphemismFormed from down plus size on the model of upgrade. It means reducing headcount, and the plainer words are make redundancies in British English and lay off in American.
- consumerismUsually criticalRarely neutral: it names a preoccupation with buying things, and the writer almost always disapproves. If you mean the study of what customers do, the phrase is consumer behaviour.
- startupInformal · spelling variesBritish writing still often prefers the hyphenated start-up; American writing has settled on one word. Either is defensible provided one document keeps to one.
- speculateTwo sensesIn finance, to invest in something risky hoping for a large gain: speculating on currencies. In ordinary English, to guess without evidence: we can only speculate. Both are current and only context separates them.
- ventureNeutral · formalA new business undertaking involving risk — a joint venture. As a verb it means to risk, or to dare to say something: he ventured an opinion. Do not confuse with adventure.
Sentences to try
Four frames from a company report. Notice which nouns can be counted and which cannot.
- The board consulted every stakeholder before the acquisition.
- The firm raised capital to cover its rising overheads.
- Analysts forecast a mild recession in the second half.
- Limited liability protects the owners from the company’s debts.
Questions about business & commerce vocabulary
What is the difference between a shareholder and a stakeholder?
A shareholder owns shares in a company and therefore owns part of it, with a financial claim on its profits. A stakeholder is anyone with an interest in what the company does — employees, customers, suppliers, local residents, regulators and shareholders alike. The set of stakeholders is much larger and mostly owns nothing. The two words are frequently confused because they sound similar, but in business writing and in exams the distinction is treated as significant.
What does "liability" mean in business English?
It has two precise senses. In accounting, liabilities are what a company owes — loans, unpaid bills, obligations — and they appear opposite assets. In law, liability means legal responsibility for loss or damage, which is why a limited liability company protects its owners’ personal money. There is also an informal figurative use meaning a burden: His temper is a liability. What liability does not mean is risk in general; for that, use risk, exposure or vulnerability.
Is it "overhead" or "overheads"?
British English uses the plural overheads for the continuing costs of running a business — rent, heating, salaries not tied to production: We need to cut our overheads. American English uses the singular uncountable overhead: reduce overhead. Both are widely understood. Note that overhead as an adjective or adverb — an overhead cable, a plane passed overhead — is the same in both varieties and unrelated to the accounting sense.