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co-opt

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: coopt and coöpt

English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From Latin cooptō (“to choose, elect”), from co(m)- + optō (“to opt”).

Pronunciation

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Verb

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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.
    • 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.
  3. To absorb or assimilate into an established group, movement, category, etc.
    • 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.
    • 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

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Translations

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See also

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Anagrams

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