party
Definitions
General English
- noun a special occasion when several people meet, usually in someone’s house, in order to celebrate something such as a birthday
Accounting
- noun a person or organisation involved in a legal dispute or legal agreement
Forex
- An individual or firm that files or responds to a legal action or takes a side of a transaction. For example, a party to a forex fraud lawsuit might be called a claimant or a respondent, depending on whether they were making a claim against another or were responding to a claim.
Law
- noun a person or group of people involved in a legal dispute, legal agreement or crime
Marketing
- noun a group of people who meet to celebrate something or to enjoy themselves
Politics
- noun a political group which joins together to gain representation and political power and which is united by common goals and ideas
Travel
- noun a group of people doing something together
Origin & History of “party”
The Latin verb partīrī ‘divide up’ was derived from pars ‘part’ (source of English part). The feminine form of its past participle, partīta, was used in vulgar Latin as a noun meaning ‘part, side’, and passed into English via Old French partie. this was later reinforced by Old French parti, which came from the Vulgar Latin neuter form *partītum and contributed the English word’s more salient current senses ‘political group’ and (in the 18th century) ‘social gathering’. other contributions made to English by the Latin past participle are the element -partite of words like bipartite, tripartite, etc and (via Italian) the musical term partita (19th c.).
