Incorporated

How to spell incorporated

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce incorporated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does incorporated mean?

1. verbCombined or included something so that it becomes part of a larger whole.
2. adjectiveFormally established as a legal corporation or company.

Incorporated in a sentence

• verb

  The final report incorporated all of the survey findings.

• adjective

  The business became incorporated shortly after its second year of trading.

• verb

  The new kitchen design incorporated a hidden pantry behind the wall.

• adjective

  An incorporated company has a legal identity separate from its owners.

Where does incorporated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb incorporare, which was built from the prefix in- meaning 'into' and corpus, corporis meaning 'body'. The literal idea was to take separate things and bring them into a single body, so the original sense was 'to combine or unite into one mass'. English adopted it through Late Latin and Old French in the late 1300s, first in the broad sense of merging or absorbing things together. From the 1600s onward it took on its specialist legal meaning, describing a group of people formally united into a single 'body' recognised by law, that is, a corporation. The shared corpus root still shows up in everyday relatives such as 'corpse', 'corporal' and 'corporate', and remembering that hidden 'body' (corpor) helps fix the tricky middle of the spelling.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• corpor (body, from Latin corpus)
• -ate (verb)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)