Business vocabulary

Although business English is sometimes considered as rather “dry stuff” because of many technical words it contains, which are not always understood in everyday speech, one cannot deny that it is constantly expanding, evolving, changing and is enriched by linguistic borrowings from other disciplines. Such borrowings can at times be amusing metaphors, however one has to be very careful because they can also confuse people who are not familiar with their deeper meaning. Considering metaphors are not literal and you cannot find out what they mean by looking up individual words in a dictionary, make sure you are absolutely sure what they mean before you use them otherwise you might offend someone.

Let’s first have a look at some frequent collocations in business English.