Definition of "IPO"

In spite of the recent falls in the value of the Nasdaq index and the value of Amazon stock, the new technology had the city by the ears: the talk was still of start-ups, IPOs, interactivity, the unimaginable future that had just begun to begin.

2001, Salman Rushdie, Fury: A Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, pages 3–4

You just shrug when you change the site’s privacy settings overnight to capture lucrative personal information and make Facebook’s IPO one of the biggest in Silicon Valley.

2013, Joanna Biggs, “Tell me everything”, in London Review of Books, volume 35, number 7