A company is an association or collection of individuals people or "warm-bodies" or else contrived "legal persons" (or a mixture of both). Company members share a common purpose and unite in order to focus their various talents and organize their collectively available skills or resources to achieve specific, declared goals.
A company can be defined as an "artificial person", invisible, intangible, created by or under Law, with a discrete legal entity, perpetual successionand a common seal. It is not affected by the death, insanity or insolvency of an individual member.
The English word has its origins in the Old French military term compaignie (first recorded in 1150), meaning a "body of soldiers", originally taken from the Late Latin word companio "companion, one who eats bread with you", first attested in the Lex Salica as a calque of the Germanicexpression *gahlaibo (literally, "with bread"), related to Old High German galeipo "companion" and Gothic gahlaiba "messmate". By 1303, the word referred to trade guilds. Usage of company to mean "business association" was first recorded in 1553 and the abbreviation "co." dates from 1769. (The equivalent French abbreviation is "cie".)
A company can be defined as an "artificial person", invisible, intangible, created by or under Law, with a discrete legal entity, perpetual successionand a common seal. It is not affected by the death, insanity or insolvency of an individual member.
The English word has its origins in the Old French military term compaignie (first recorded in 1150), meaning a "body of soldiers", originally taken from the Late Latin word companio "companion, one who eats bread with you", first attested in the Lex Salica as a calque of the Germanicexpression *gahlaibo (literally, "with bread"), related to Old High German galeipo "companion" and Gothic gahlaiba "messmate". By 1303, the word referred to trade guilds. Usage of company to mean "business association" was first recorded in 1553 and the abbreviation "co." dates from 1769. (The equivalent French abbreviation is "cie".)