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Commerce vs Commence - What's the difference?

commerce | commence |

As verbs the difference between commerce and commence

is that commerce is to carry on trade; to traffic while commence is to begin, start.

As a noun commerce

is the exchange or buying and selling of commodities; especially the exchange of merchandise, on a large scale, between different places or communities; extended trade or traffic.

commerce

English

Noun

  • (business) The exchange or buying and selling of commodities; especially the exchange of merchandise, on a large scale, between different places or communities; extended trade or traffic.
  • Social intercourse; the dealings of one person or class in society with another; familiarity.
  • * Macaulay:
  • Fifteen years of thought, observation, and commerce with the world had made him [Bunyan] wiser.
  • * 1881 , :
  • Suppose we held our converse not in words, but in music; those who have a bad ear would find themselves cut off from all near commerce , and no better than foreigners in this big world.
  • (obsolete) Sexual intercourse.
  • A round game at cards, in which the cards are subject to exchange, barter, or trade.
  • (Hoyle)

    Synonyms

    * trade, traffic, dealings, intercourse, interchange, communion, communication * See also

    Derived terms

    * chamber of commerce * commercial

    Verb

    (commerc)
  • (dated) To carry on trade; to traffic.
  • Beware you commerce not with bankrupts. -B. Jonson.
  • (dated) To hold intercourse; to commune.
  • Commercing with himself. -Tennyson.
    Musicians ... taught the people in angelic harmonies to commerce with heaven. -Prof. Wilson.

    commence

    English

    Verb

    (commenc)
  • To begin, start.
  • * (William Shakespeare)
  • Here the anthem doth commence .
  • * (Oliver Goldsmith)
  • His heaven commences ere the world be past.
  • * , chapter=4
  • , title= Mr. Pratt's Patients , passage=Then he commenced to talk, really talk. and inside of two flaps of a herring's fin he had me mesmerized, like Eben Holt's boy at the town hall show. He talked about the ills of humanity, and the glories of health and Nature and service and land knows what all.}}
  • To begin to be, or to act as.
  • * (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
  • We commence judges ourselves.
  • (UK, intransitive, dated) To take a degree at a university.
  • * Fuller
  • I question whether the formality of commencing was used in that age.

    Antonyms

    * cease * stop