Collaborating

How to spell collaborating

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce collaborating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does collaborating mean?

1. verbWorking together with one or more people to produce or achieve something.

Collaborating in a sentence

• The two departments are collaborating on the annual budget report.

• She enjoys collaborating with designers from other studios.

Where does collaborating come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb collaborare, which means 'to work together'. It was built from com- meaning 'together' (reduced to col- before the letter l) and laborare meaning 'to work or toil', which itself comes from the noun labor, the same root that gives us 'labour' and 'laboratory'. The verb 'collaborate' arrived in English in the early to middle nineteenth century, carrying the plain sense of two or more people working jointly on a task. During the twentieth century it picked up a darker secondary sense of cooperating with an enemy occupier, but the everyday meaning remained about shared work. The single b but doubled l is the spelling trap, and it traces directly to that prefix col- joined to the labor root.

How the word is built

• col- (together, from com-)
• labor (to work)
• -ate (verb suffix)
• -ing (present participle)