Collaboration

How to spell collaboration

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce collaboration

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does collaboration mean?

1. nounThe action of working jointly with others to produce or achieve something.

Collaboration in a sentence

• The new product was the result of close collaboration between two departments.

• Their research collaboration produced three published papers in a single year.

Where does collaboration come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin collaborare, meaning 'to work together', formed from com- 'with, together' and laborare 'to labour or toil', which itself rests on labor, the everyday Latin word for hard work or effort. English borrowed the noun in the nineteenth century, modelled on the French collaboration, to describe the act of two or more people working jointly on a single task. The same labor root sits openly inside English words such as 'laborious', 'elaborate' and 'labourer', which can help anchor the spelling. During the Second World War the word also picked up a darker, more specific sense: secretly aiding an enemy occupier, a meaning still felt in the related noun 'collaborator'. The spelling trap is the double l early on (col-lab) followed by a single b and single r, so it pays to remember the com- prefix doubling its m into an l before 'labor'.

How the word is built

• col- (together, from com-)
• labor (to work)
• -ation (noun of action)