Corporate

How to spell corporate

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce corporate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does corporate mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to a large company or to business organisations in general.

Corporate in a sentence

• The firm rewrote its corporate policy on remote working.

• She left a senior corporate role to start her own consultancy.

Where does corporate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin corporatus, the past participle of corporare, meaning 'to form into a body' or 'to embody'. At its heart sits corpus, the ordinary Latin word for 'body', which also gives us 'corpse', 'corps', and 'corpulent'. The original idea was that a group of people could be legally united into a single 'body', so a corporation was literally a collection of individuals treated as one entity. English adopted corporate in the fifteenth century, first describing groups formed into a legal body and later the businesses and commercial culture we mean today. The buried corpus is a handy spelling reminder: there is a 'corp' (a body) at the front, and the ending is -ate, not -it or -et, even though the unstressed final syllable sounds like a vague schwa.

How the word is built

• corpor- (from corpus: body)
• -ate (adjective suffix, forming 'united into one body')