Collaborator

How to spell collaborator

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce collaborator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does collaborator mean?

1. nounA person who works jointly with others on a shared project or piece of work.
2. nounA person who cooperates with an enemy force occupying their own country.

Collaborator in a sentence

• Her longtime collaborator on the research paper lives in another country.

• After the war, a suspected collaborator was put on trial.

• The songwriter credited his collaborator for the melody.

• The resistance fighters exposed a local collaborator who had reported them.

Where does collaborator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb collaborare, meaning 'to work together', formed from the prefix com- 'together' (here softened to col- before an l) and laborare 'to labour or toil'. The underlying noun labor simply meant 'work, effort or hardship', the same root that gives us 'labour', 'laborious' and 'elaborate'. English took the verb 'collaborate' from this Latin source in the nineteenth century, and 'collaborator' followed naturally as the agent noun, naming the person who does the joint work. During the Second World War the word picked up a darker secondary sense, describing someone who cooperates with an enemy occupying their country, a meaning borrowed directly from French usage of the period. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the double l of col- and the unstressed vowels that get swallowed in speech (col-LAB-or-ay-tor), which is why writers often drop a letter or lose the second a.

How the word is built

• col- (together, from com-)
• labor (work)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -or (one who does the action)