Word.ws English Dictionary

co-opted

co-opted is the simple past and past participle of co-opt.

Meaning of co-opt

Verb

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

  1. (transitive) To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.
  2. (transitive) To commandeer, appropriate or take over.
    • 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.2009, chapter 2, in Josephine Berry Slater, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, editors, Proud to be Flesh, →ISBN
  3. (transitive) To absorb or assimilate into an established group, movement, category, etc.
    • 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.2000, David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise […] , Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 43

Questions about co-opted

What is co-opted the simple past and past participle of?
Co-opted is the simple past and past participle of co-opt.

Words near co-opted in the dictionary

  1. co-ops
  2. co-opt
  3. co-optation
  4. co-optations
  5. co-optative
  6. co-opted
  7. co-opter
  8. co-opting
  9. co-option
  10. co-options
  11. co-optive

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: co-opted (page history and authors); co-opt (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “co-opted.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/co-opted. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.