economy /(ē̇*kŏn"ō̇*my̆)/

pl. Economies ((ē̇*kŏn"ō̇*mĭz))

1. 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.

2. 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.
3. 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.

   In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see the economy . . . of poems better observed than in Terence.

   The Jews already had a Sabbath, which, as citizens and subjects of that economy, they were obliged to keep.

4. 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.

   I have no other notion of economy than that it is the parent to liberty and ease.

   The father was more given to frugality, and the son to riotousness [luxuriousness].