economics

Etymology

From economy + -ics, from Latin oeconomia, from Ancient Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomía, “the management of a household”).

noun

1. (social sciences) The study of resource allocation, distribution and consumption; of capital and investment; and of management of the factors of production.
   Mary studied economics for 5 years before going into banking.
   Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. 2013-08-03, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847