Origins

In a 2002 meeting of Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and George Bush it was reported that the American leader noted "the problem with the French was that they had no word for Entrepreneur."

He may have been right to support an ownership society (although the "workers owning the means of production" echos Marx) but he was wrong about the origin of the word. Entrepreneur is a borrowed word from the French. It comes from the preposition entre (between) and the verb prendre (to take). The noun preneur means buyer.

Translating entrepreneur literally provides us with "between the buyers." This is an interesting conception of the role of an entrepreneur even if it is a questionable approach to translation.