privatization

• privatisation

Coined by Sidney Merlin in 1943, who was aware of the term reprivatization, already attested at the time.

privatization (countable and uncountable, plural privatizations)

1. The transfer of a company or organization from government to private ownership and control.

   Coordinate term: denationalization

   • 1943, Sidney Merlin, “Trends in German Economic Control Since 1933”, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, page 207:

     The party, moreover, facilitates the accumulation of private fortunes and industrial empires by its foremost members and collaborators through ‘privatization’ and other measures, thereby intensifying centralization of economic affairs and government in an increasingly narrow group that may for all practical purposes be termed the national socialist elite.

2. (uncommon) The rendering of a thought or an idea, as private in scope.

• nationalization

• self-privatization

• privatize