Collective

How to spell collective

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce collective

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does collective mean?

1. adjectiveDone by or shared among all the members of a group acting together.
2. nounA business or organisation owned and run jointly by its members.

Collective in a sentence

• adjective

  The staff made a collective decision to extend the deadline.

• noun

  The artists formed a collective to share studio space and costs.

• adjective

  The tenants brought a collective complaint about the broken lift.

• noun

  Profits from the bakery collective are split equally among the workers.

Where does collective come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin collectivus, meaning 'gathered together', which was built on the verb colligere, 'to gather up'. That verb combines the prefix com-, meaning 'together', with legere, a versatile root that meant 'to gather', 'to pick out', and eventually 'to read'. English took it in through Old French collectif in the late 1300s, at first as a grammatical and logical term for nouns that name a group as a single unit. Over time the broad sense of 'belonging to or shared by a whole group' grew dominant, and the modern noun for a jointly run enterprise arrived much later, in the early twentieth century. The same legere root sits inside 'collect', 'select', and 'lecture', which all turn on the idea of picking and gathering, and the doubled 'l' in the prefix is exactly the spot writers tend to slip on.

How the word is built

• col- (com-, together)
• lect (gather/choose, from Latin legere)
• -ive (adjective/noun suffix)