Meaning & use
saleable
Last updated
Meanings
adjectivecomparable
Good enough, or in enough demand, to be bought by customers; able to be sold.
Grammar: Used before a noun or after a linking verb: a saleable product, or the goods are saleable.
Patterns
- be saleable at something
- a saleable product
The damaged chairs were no longer saleable, so the shop threw them away.
She turned her hobby into a saleable skill.
Only saleable items will be accepted at the charity shop.
adjectivenot comparablelegal
Legally permitted to be sold.
Grammar: Used with goods or property: the land is saleable once the dispute ends.
Patterns
- saleable under something
The property is only saleable once the owners agree on the price.
These medicines are saleable only with a prescription.
Word forms
| comparative | more saleable |
|---|---|
| superlative | most saleable |
Common combinations
- a saleable product
- The team needs a saleable product before the investors pay more.
- highly saleable
- Handmade pottery can be highly saleable at summer markets.
- saleable condition
- The used laptop was in saleable condition after a clean-up.
- saleable goods
- Staff sorted the saleable goods from the broken ones.
- a saleable skill
- Fluency in two languages is a saleable skill.
Synonyms and how they differ
- marketable
- Marketable is often used for skills and ideas as well as goods, while saleable usually points to physical items that customers will buy.
- sellable
- Sellable is a rarer variant that means the same but looks less polished in business writing.
- commercial
- Commercial describes something aimed at profit in general, whereas saleable says that this particular item can actually be sold.
Opposites
Word family
- sale noun
- the act of selling something
- saleability noun
- how easily something can be sold
- unsaleable adjective
- impossible or hard to sell
- sell verb
- to give something in exchange for money
Commonly confused: saleable or sailable?
saleable vs sailable
Sailable describes a boat or water that can be sailed on, and it sounds almost the same but has nothing to do with selling.
Practice
The shop manager said the scratched mirrors were not ____ and had to be thrown out.
Choose one answer.
Saleable means able to be sold, which fits damaged goods that customers will not buy. Sailable and scalable are real words but belong to boats and growth, and salient means prominent.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “saleable”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.