in business

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Meaning · English

relating to or involved in commercial activities

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

Liên quan đến hoặc tham gia vào hoạt động thương mại

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: within the realm of business
Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

Both France and West Germany intend to double their reprocessing capacity by 1990 — when the THORP plant at Windscale should be in business.
And there's a long, hard road to travel before you can say you're really “ in business ”.

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.

Common questions

What does “in business” mean?

relating to or involved in commercial activities Literally: within the realm of business

Is “in business” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.