cooperate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cooperate is 9 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kəʊˈɒp.ə.ɹeɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,723 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for cooperate, with forms such as "ccooperate", "cooeprate", and "coopearte". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 2 confusable-pair relationships, "corporate", "cooperative", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Originated 1595–1605 from Late Latin cooperātus, perfect passive participle of cooperor (“to work with”), see -ate (verb-forming suffix) for more. Equivalent to co- + operate. Displaced native Old English efnwyrċan. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is cooperate, spelled C-O-O-P-E-R-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.