Word.ws English Dictionary

coopt

coopt is the alternative form 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

Forms of coopt

third-person singular presentcoopts
present participlecoopting
past participlecoopted
pastcoopted

Words formed from coopt

Questions about coopt

What is coopt the alternative form of?
Coopt is the alternative form of co-opt.

Words near coopt in the dictionary

  1. coopless
  2. coops
  3. coops in
  4. coops up
  5. coopsful
  6. coopt
  7. cooptate
  8. cooptated
  9. cooptates
  10. cooptating
  11. cooptation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: coopt (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: “coopt.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/coopt. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.