Where Does The Word 'Entrepreneur' Come From?

The word 'entrepreneur' is a French word which describes a person who founds, organizes and manages one or multiple new businesses.
The French infinitive 'entreprendre' translates as 'to undertake'. Another way of looking at the word is to separate it into 'entre' meaning 'between' and 'prendre' meaning 'to take'. By doing this, we can interpret the typical entrepreneur as being a middleman acting between the investors who he takes money from and the employees that do the actual work to make profits.

The word was brought into the English language by an Irish Economist named Richard Cantillon who lived between 1680 and 1734. He spent a large portion of his life living in France, hence why he loaned a French word and placed into our English vocabularies.

There are many famous entrepreneurs such as Alan Sugar (computers), Donald Trump (real estate), Richard Branson (founder of Virgin) and Anita Roddick (founder of The Body Shop).