operate.
To perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.
Meaning & usage
To perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.
Could someone explain how this meeting operates?
In this town, the garbage removal staff operate between six o'clock at midnight.
To produce an effect.
To produce an effect. To produce an appropriate physical effect; to issue in the result designed by nature; especially (medicine) to take appropriate effect on the human system.
To produce an effect. To act or produce an effect on the mind; to exert moral power or influence.
To bring about as an effect; to cause.
To perform some manual act upon a human body in a methodical manner, and usually with instruments, with a view to restore soundness or health, as in amputation, lithotomy, etc.
The surgeon had to operate on her heart.
I'm being operated tomorrow.
To deal in stocks or any commodity with a view to speculative profits.
To put into, or to continue in, operation or activity; to work.
to operate a machine
to operate a system
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₃ep- Proto-Indo-European *-os Proto-Indo-European *h₃épos Proto-Italic *opos Latin opus Latin opera Proto-Indo-European *-h₂ Proto-Indo-European *-éh₂ Proto-Indo-European *-tós Proto-Indo-European *-eh₂tos Proto-Italic *-ātos Latin -ātus Latin operātusder. English operate From Latin operātus, perfect passive participle of operor (“to work, labor, toil, have effect”), see -ate (verb-forming suffix).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.