Incorporate

How to spell incorporate

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce incorporate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does incorporate mean?

1. verbTo include something as part of a larger whole, or to combine elements into a single unit.
2. verbTo form a business or organisation into a legally recognised corporation.

Incorporate in a sentence

• The architect agreed to incorporate extra storage into the design.

• The founders chose to incorporate the start-up before seeking investment.

• Good managers incorporate feedback from staff before making a decision.

• A solicitor can help you incorporate the charity as a limited company.

Where does incorporate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the late Latin incorporare, which meant 'to form into a body' or 'to embody'. It was built from the prefix in-, meaning 'into', and the noun corpus, meaning 'body', so the literal sense was to take separate things and unite them into a single body. English adopted it in the late 1300s, at first in a quite physical and even spiritual sense of joining things into one mass or whole. Over time the meaning broadened to cover absorbing one thing into another and, by the 1600s, the legal idea of forming people into a single 'body corporate', a company recognised in law. The very same corpus root sits inside everyday words such as 'corpse', 'corporal' and 'corporation', and remembering that hidden 'body' is a handy way to keep the -por- in the middle of the spelling.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• corpor (body, from Latin corpus)
• -ate (verb suffix)