co-opt
See also: coopt and coöpt
English
Alternative forms
- coopt, coöpt
Etymology
From Latin cooptō (“to choose, elect”), from co(m)- + optō (“to opt”).
Pronunciation
- Rhymes: -ɒpt
- IPA(key): /kəʊˈɒpt/
Audio (US) (file)
Verb
co-opt (third-person singular simple present co-opts, present participle co-opting, simple past and past participle co-opted)
- To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.
- To commandeer, appropriate or take over.
- To absorb or assimilate into an established group.
- 2000, David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise […] , Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 43:
- In the resolution between the culture and the counterculture, it is impossible to tell who co-opted whom, because in reality the bohemians and the bourgeois co-opted each other. They emerge from this process as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos.
- 2009, chapter 2, in Josephine Berry Slater; Pauline van Mourik Broekman, editors, Proud to be Flesh, →ISBN:
- Artists' engagement with bleeding-edge tech will always have the potential to critique its destructive civil and military applications, as well as the potential to be co-opted by them—as propaganda or R&D—as the rise of the so-called knowledge economy has amply demonstrated.
- 2016 July 7, Alexis Petridis, “Roísín Murphy: Take Her Up to Monto review – still too strange for the bigtime”, in The Guardian:
- Its opening track, Mastermind, offers one possible answer to a theoretical question about what prog rock might have sounded like in the highly unlikely event that it had co-opted Giorgio Moroder’s brand of electronic disco: nearly seven meandering, episodic minutes of unlikely chord changes […]
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Derived terms
- co-optation
- co-optative
- co-option
- co-optive
Translations
To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.
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To commandeer, appropriate or take over.
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To absorb or assimilate into an established group.
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See also
- recuperation
Anagrams
- Copto-