Coordinating

How to spell coordinating

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce coordinating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coordinating mean?

1. verbOrganising different people, tasks, or things so that they work together effectively.
2. adjectiveDescribing something that matches or works in harmony with something else, especially in grammar a word that joins items of equal rank.

Coordinating in a sentence

• verb

  She spent the morning coordinating the volunteers for the charity run.

• adjective

  The word 'and' is a coordinating conjunction that links two equal clauses.

• verb

  The project manager is responsible for coordinating the work of three separate teams.

• adjective

  She chose a scarf in a coordinating shade to match her coat.

Where does coordinating come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin co-, meaning 'together', joined to ordinare, 'to arrange in order', which itself was built on ordo, the Latin noun for 'order', 'rank', or 'a row'. The original idea was therefore to place several things into the same orderly arrangement so that they work as one. English assembled 'coordinate' as a learned formation in the seventeenth century, at first in philosophical and mathematical writing where points and quantities were ranked of equal status, and the everyday managerial sense of 'making people or tasks work smoothly together' grew from there. The present participle 'coordinating' simply adds the -ing ending to that verb. The same ordo root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'order', 'ordinary', and 'subordinate', and noticing the doubled 'o' at the start, two separate o sounds rather than one, is the surest way to remember the spelling.

How the word is built

• co- (together)
• ordin- (from Latin ordo: order, rank)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)