to corner the market
9
7.2
- phrasal verb
:
acaparar el mercado
- Aeolian's competitors quickly complained to Congress about Aeolian's attempt to corner the music market.
No, I'm I've cornered the market for sad people on boats.
- No, I'm I've cornered the market for sad people on boats.
- The GOP really has cornered the fake badge market.
- The first time was when he saw that one of his peers, Percy the Cotton King Thomas, had failed to corner the cotton market and went broke in the process.
Examples
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Cartoon character undies are still around, and Fruit of the Loom seems to have cornered the market.
Blog text (3) -
Get demand to fall and corner the market.
Blog text (20) -
Apparently you guys in this town are trying to corner the market.
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What are you trying to do, corner the market?
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...corner the market on a new drug.
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Still, chain stores did not completely corner the market on African American business.
Academic text (1999) -
The Dukes are trying to corner the market.
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We are the best at it, and we have pretty much cornered that market for quite some time.
Blog text (1) -
Kappa Nu has cornered the market on weed.
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The company managed to corner the market on organic produce, allowing them to set higher prices.
Synonyms
22
6.7
To take complete control of something so others cannot use it
21
7.7
To gain control of most of a product's supply to raise its price
How Successful
Surface Forms
Morphology
The verb 'corner' can be understood metaphorically as forcing or trapping something, and combined with 'market' (commerce) this gives a plausible hint of gaining control over a market. However, the specific business nuance of monopolizing supply or fixing prices is a metaphorical/idiomatic extension that is not fully predictable from the parts and varies across languages, so learners who only know the constituents would likely only partially infer the exact meaning.
Etymology
The phrase corner the market comes from a busy market image: if someone bought so much of a product that sellers had nowhere to sell, it was like pushing them into a corner and taking over the market. So today corner the market means 'to gain enough control of the supply to set prices or keep other sellers out'.