Cooperate

How to spell cooperate

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce cooperate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cooperate mean?

1. verbTo work together with others towards a shared goal, or to comply willingly with a request.

Cooperate in a sentence

• The two departments agreed to cooperate on the budget review.

• Witnesses are expected to cooperate fully with the investigation.

Where does cooperate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Late Latin cooperari, formed from the prefix co-, meaning 'together', and operari, meaning 'to work' or 'to labour'. That verb was itself built on opus, the Latin noun for 'work' or 'a piece of labour', the same root that gives us 'opera', 'operate', and 'opus' itself. The literal sense was simply 'to work together', and that meaning has remained remarkably stable across the centuries. English adopted the word in the early 1600s, often spelled with a diaeresis or a hyphen (co-operate) to show that the two o's are sounded separately rather than blended into a single long vowel. That doubled-o is the spelling trap: writers know two o's belong there but hesitate over whether to split them, and modern usage increasingly writes the closed form 'cooperate'.

How the word is built

• co- (together)
• oper (work, from Latin operari)
• -ate (verb suffix)