consumer price index

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun An index of prices used to measure the change in the cost of basic goods and services in comparison with a fixed base period.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun An index of the cost of all goods and services to a typical consumer, calculated and published by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics; abbreviated CPI, and usually referred to by that acronym. The Bureau maintains several indices for different groups of consumers, but the most commonly referred to is the index for “All urban consumers”, called the CPI-U. The increase of this value each year is one measure of monetary inflation.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun economics A statistical estimate of the level of prices of goods and services bought for consumption purposes by households.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun an index of the cost of all goods and services to a typical consumer