Cooperative

How to spell cooperative

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce cooperative

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cooperative mean?

1. adjectiveWilling to help and to work together with others.
2. nounA business or organisation owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits or benefits.

Cooperative in a sentence

• adjective

  The witness was calm and cooperative throughout the interview.

• noun

  The farmers formed a cooperative to sell their grain at a fairer price.

• adjective

  A cooperative attitude from both teams kept the project on schedule.

• noun

  She buys her vegetables from a local food cooperative.

Where does cooperative come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb cooperari, meaning 'to work together', which was formed from co- 'together' and operari 'to work, to labour', itself rooted in opus, the Latin noun for 'work' or 'effort'. Late Latin used cooperari in a religious sense of working alongside divine grace, and the idea of joint effort carried into English in the 1600s through the verb 'cooperate'. The adjective and noun 'cooperative' followed, describing first a willingness to act jointly and later, in the 1800s, a business jointly owned and run by its members for their mutual benefit. The same opus root gives us familiar relatives such as 'operate', 'opera', and 'opus' itself. The single spelling trap is the doubled o at the start, since the prefix co- meets the oper root directly; modern usage tends to write it solid without the older diaeresis, so 'cooperative' has two o's in a row that writers sometimes collapse into one.

How the word is built

• co- (together)
• oper (from operari: to work)
• -ative (adjective/noun suffix)