<Japanesezaiteku, <zai wealth + teku partial translation of Englishtechn.4
Meaning & use
Commerce.
1986–
Investment in financial markets by a company as a means of supplementing the earnings which it receives from its principal operations.
1986
The Euromarkets have already drawn Japan's banks and securities houses to London. Now the country's companies are arriving—for the Zaiteku.
Economist 28 June 86/3
1986
Everyone seems to be trying his hand at deftly juggling securities using ‘zaitech’, or financial engineering.
Washington Post 26 October d2/2
1988
The word zaitek is an amalgam of Japanese and foreign elements.
A. Viner, Emerging Power Japanese Money v. 155
1989
Big enterprises in banking, transportation, and commerce have maintained extremely labor-intensive services, besides services outstanding in the use of limited numbers of personnel extremely qualified in innovative methods of Zaitech as well as of modern electronic communication systems.
M. & H. Schmiegelow, Strategic Pragmatism iv. 110
1992
About 70 percent of the $135 billion went for zaitech, Japanese slang for financial engineering.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
zaitech typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zaitech is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zaitech, n., 1980–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1980
0.0027
1990
0.0027
2000
0.0027
2010
0.0027
zaitech, n. was first published in 1997; not fully revised.