\E*con"o*my\, n.; pl. {Economies}. [F. ['e]conomie, L.
oeconomia household management, fr. Gr. ?, fr. ? one managing
a household; ? house (akin to L. vicus village, E. vicinity)
+ ? usage, law, rule, fr. ne`mein to distribute, manage. See
{Vicinity}, {Nomad}.]
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.
                                               --Froude.
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. --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.
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.
{Political economy}. See under {Political}.
Syn: {Economy}, {Frugality}, {Parsimony}. Economy avoids all
     waste and extravagance, and applies money to the best
     advantage; frugality cuts off indulgences, and proceeds
     on a system of saving. The latter conveys the idea of
     not using or spending superfluously, and is opposed to
     lavishness or profusion. Frugality is usually applied to
     matters of consumption, and commonly points to
     simplicity of manners; parsimony is frugality carried to
     an extreme, involving meanness of spirit, and a sordid
     mode of living. Economy is a virtue, and parsimony a
     vice.
   I have no other notion of economy than that it is the
   parent to liberty and ease.                 --Swift.
   The father was more given to frugality, and the son to
   riotousness [luxuriousness].                --Golding.