ECONOMY

The management of domestic affairs; the regulation and government of household matters; especially as they concern expense or disbursement; as, a careful economy. Himself busy in charge of the household economies. Froude.

Orderly arrangement and management of the internal affairs of a state or of any establishment kept up by production and consumption; esp., such management as directly concerns wealth; as, political economy.

The system of rules and regulations by which anything is managed; orderly system of regulating the distribution and uses of parts, conceived as the result of wise and economical adaptation in the author, whether human or divine; as, the animal or vegetable economy; the economy of a poem; the Jewish economy. The position which they [the verb and adjective] hold in the general economy of language. Earle. In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see the economy . . . of poems better observed than in Terence. B. Jonson. The Jews already had a Sabbath, which, as citizens and subjects of that economy, they were obliged to keep. Paley.

Thrifty and frugal housekeeping; management without loss or waste; frugality in expenditure; prudence and disposition to save; as, a housekeeper accustomed to economy but not to parsimony. Political economy. See under Political.