商人

What it means

商人 (shōnin) means a person who buys and sells goods or services for profit; it refers to someone engaged in trade, distribution or commercial transactions rather than production. In contemporary usage it covers small shopkeepers, wholesale traders and businesspeople whose primary role is exchanging goods or acting as intermediaries between producers and consumers.

Main meanings

• 1. A member of a historical urban merchant class or town trader distinct from farmers and artisans.
• 2. A businessperson focused on commerce and trade rather than manufacturing or services.
• 3. Sometimes used with a mildly pejorative nuance to describe someone driven mainly by profit.
• 4. Appears in compound terms specifying the kind of merchant (e.g., a rice merchant, textile merchant).

How to use it

Used in both modern and historical contexts to refer to people involved in trade; appropriate in neutral formal writing, business descriptions, legal or academic texts and historical accounts, while casual speech might prefer words like shopkeeper or salesperson; the term can appear in compound nouns and job descriptions and carry a slightly literary or formal tone depending on context.