Coordinator

How to spell coordinator

11 letters · 5 syllables

3 of the 42 people asked to spell coordinator in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce coordinator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coordinator mean?

1. nounA person who organises people, tasks, or events so that the separate parts work together smoothly.

Coordinator in a sentence

• The events coordinator booked the venue and confirmed every supplier.

• As project coordinator, she kept all four teams working to the same deadline.

Where does coordinator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word ultimately traces to the Latin ordo, meaning 'order', 'row', or 'rank', the same root that gives us 'order', 'ordinary', and 'ordinal'. From ordo came the verb ordinare, 'to arrange in order', and adding the prefix co-, meaning 'together', produced the idea of arranging several things into a shared order. English assembled 'coordinate' from these Latin parts in the seventeenth century, originally in the sense of placing things on the same level or rank rather than one above another. The agent ending -or was then attached to name the person who does the coordinating, and the modern office sense (someone who organises people and tasks) became common in the twentieth century. The spelling trap lives right at the start: the two o's of co- and ordin- sit side by side as 'coo', and the unstressed 'din' syllable is easy to mishandle.

How the word is built

• co- (together)
• ordin- (from Latin ordo: order, rank)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -or (agent suffix: one who does)