Incorporating

How to spell incorporating

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce incorporating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does incorporating mean?

1. verbIncluding or combining something so that it becomes part of a larger whole.
2. verbForming a business or organisation into a legal corporate body.

Incorporating in a sentence

• The new design is worth incorporating several customer suggestions.

• The lawyer guided them through incorporating their start-up as a limited company.

• By incorporating feedback early, the team avoided costly revisions later.

• Incorporating the business gave the founders protection from personal liability.

Where does incorporating come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin noun corpus, meaning simply 'body', the same root that gives us 'corpse', 'corporation' and 'corporal'. Late Latin built the verb incorporare from in- ('into') and corpus, with the literal sense of forming something into a single body or absorbing it into a body. By the late 1300s English had taken the word through Old French, first in the sense of uniting separate parts into one whole, and later in the legal sense of forming a town or company into a recognised corporate body. The present participle 'incorporating' simply adds the -ing ending to that verb. The spelling trap lies in remembering the o in 'corpor', since the unstressed middle syllables blur in speech, and in keeping the single r before -ating.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• corpor- (body, from Latin corpus)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)
• -ing (present participle)