Co-opt

Quick meaning: Co-opt is a verb meaning (transitive) To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.

Meaning

(transitive) To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.

More Meanings

1. (transitive) To commandeer, appropriate or take over.
2. (transitive) To absorb or assimilate into an established group, movement, category, etc.

Example Sentences

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.

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.

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 […]

Word Forms

• co-opts
• co-opting
• co-opted
• coopt

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include cooptate, induct, enlist, choose, join, adlect.

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