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to go public

to go public

102 4.8
To start selling shares to the public for the first time on a stock market
  • phrasal verb
  • /ɡoʊ ˈpʌblɪk/
  • Specialized
translation icon : salir a bolsa
  • Investors are excited because the firm will go public next month, allowing them to buy shares.

Well, we're recently public and, you know, we went public during the pandemic.

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Examples

  • After several years of growth, the company is finally ready to go public on the stock market.

  • The tech startup plans to go public by the end of the year to raise funds for expansion.

  • You have to either go public or get sold.

  • After that, you will go public with the truth about the operation.

  • We're about to go public.

  • Has he decided to go public?

  • Typically, a Canadian company might go public at ten dollars a share.

    Academic text (1999)
  • Later Snap went public selling shares with no voting rights whatsoever.

  • Royal Pacific is the first salmon farm to go public on the Vancouver stock market.

    Academic text (1990)
  • But after Netscape went public, the idea of infinite growth online gained.

    Academic text (2016)

How Public

to go public
  • Specialized
102 4.8
to report
686 1.6

Surface Forms

go public infinitive
gone public past participle
going public present participle
goes public third person singular

Morphology

go + public

The components 'go' (become) + 'public' (open/nonprivate) make the general idea 'become public' relatively transparent, so a learner could guess it involves changing from private to public visibility. However, the specific financial sense — starting to sell shares via an IPO — is a specialized business meaning that is not fully predictable from the words alone and may require domain knowledge, so the MWE is only partially transparent.

Etymology

Go public comes from the image of a private company stepping out of a closed room into a busy town square, literally go out and be public, so everyone can see it. So, 'go public' means 'to start selling shares to the public'.