Consumption means using up or eating something. When you eat an apple, that's consumption. When a car burns gasoline to run, that's fuel consumption. The word captures the idea of something being used and therefore depleted or gone.

Economists use consumption to describe all the goods and services people buy and use: food, clothing, movies, haircuts, everything. When news reports say “consumer spending is up,” they mean people are purchasing and consuming more things. A society's total consumption helps measure how its economy is doing.

The word also describes how quickly something gets used up. A laptop with high battery consumption drains its charge quickly. A factory with heavy water consumption uses tremendous amounts of water in its manufacturing process.

In older times, consumption was another name for tuberculosis, a serious lung disease that seemed to consume the body from within. Doctors no longer use this term, but you might encounter it in historical novels or old documents.

Related words include consumer (someone who buys and uses things) and consume (the verb form). When something is consumable, it's meant to be used up, like printer ink or notebooks. Notice how these words all share the sense of something being used, spent, or depleted.