Operations

How to spell operations

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce operations

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does operations mean?

1. nounThe day-to-day activities and processes through which an organisation runs and produces results.
2. nounCoordinated military or strategic actions carried out to achieve a particular objective.
3. nounProcesses such as addition or multiplication that act on numbers or data to produce a result.

Operations in a sentence

• The new manager streamlined the company's daily operations to cut costs.

• The general planned the operations in complete secrecy for several weeks.

• The spreadsheet performs thousands of operations in a fraction of a second.

• The factory moved its operations to a larger site near the motorway.

• Relief operations began as soon as the floodwaters started to recede.

• Students learn the order of operations before tackling longer equations.

Where does operations come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb operari, meaning 'to work' or 'to labour', which itself grew from opus, the noun for a 'work' or 'task'. From operari came the Latin noun operatio, describing the act of working or producing an effect, and that form passed into Old French as operacion before entering English in the late 1300s. Early uses leaned on the sense of a working or a process producing a result, which is why the word later branched into so many specialised fields: surgical operations, military operations, mathematical operations, and the running of a business. The same opus root survives in everyday relatives like 'opera' (literally a body of work) and 'cooperate' (to work together). The spelling stays regular throughout: keep the single 'p', the 'oper' stem, and the familiar '-ation' ending before adding the plural 's'.

How the word is built

• oper- (from Latin operari: to work)
• -ate (verb)
• -ion (noun of action)
• -s (plural)