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

• enPR: kōˈ-ŏptˌ
  • (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈkəʊˌɒpt/
  • (US) IPA^(key): /ˈkoʊˌɑpt/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɒpt, -ɑpt

Verb

co-opt (third-person singular simple present co-opts, present participle co-opting, simple past and past participle co-opted)

1. To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.
2. To commandeer, appropriate or take over.
3. 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^[1]:

     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 […]

Derived terms

• co-optation
• co-optative
• co-option
• co-optive

 

Translations

elect as a fellow member of a group

• Catalan: cooptar (ca)
• French: coopter (fr)
• German: kooptieren (de)
• Ido: kooptar (io)
• Italian: cooptare (it)
• Romanian: cooptare (ro)
• Russian: принима́ть в соста́в (prinimátʹ v sostáv)
• Spanish: cooptar (es)

commandeer

• Dutch: toe-eigenen (nl)
• Spanish: arrebatar (es), adueñarse (es)

absorb or assimilate

• German: kooptieren (de)
• Russian: привлека́ть на свою́ сто́рону impf (privlekátʹ na svojú stóronu), поглоти́ть (ru) pf (poglotítʹ), вобра́ть в себя́ pf (vobrátʹ v sebjá)

See also

• recuperation

Anagrams

• Copto-