Cohort

How to spell cohort

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cohort

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cohort mean?

1. nounA group of people sharing a common feature, especially one studied or tracked together over a period of time.
2. nounA division of an ancient Roman legion, comprising several hundred soldiers.
3. nounA companion, supporter, or accomplice who acts alongside someone.

Cohort in a sentence

• The researchers followed the entire cohort of patients for ten years.

• Each cohort formed roughly a tenth of a Roman legion.

• The suspect and his cohort were arrested at the warehouse.

• This year's graduate cohort is the largest the firm has ever hired.

• The general ordered a single cohort to hold the bridge while the rest advanced.

• She arrived at the meeting flanked by her usual cohort from the legal team.

Where does cohort come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin cohors, with the stem cohort-, which originally meant an enclosure, a farmyard, or a pen for animals. From that idea of a bounded space the Romans extended the word to mean a body of soldiers penned together as a unit, and a cohort became a formal division of a Roman legion, roughly a tenth of it and several hundred men strong. English borrowed the term in the fifteenth century by way of French, keeping the military sense at first. Over time it broadened to mean any band of associates, and by the twentieth century social scientists had narrowed it again into the precise modern sense of a group of people who share a defining characteristic, such as being born in the same year. The spelling preserves the Latin co- (together) joined to the hort- root, so remembering 'cohors, the Roman unit' helps fix the single h and the -ort ending.

How the word is built

• co- (together)
• hort (enclosure, yard, from Latin cohors)