operate
verb
Simple meaning
To perform a work or labour.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
ahperaytSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈɑpɚeɪt
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
verb
transitive or intransitive
To perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.
Perform surgery on
“The doctors operated on the patient but failed to save his life.”
intransitive
To act or produce an effect on the mind; to exert moral power or influence.
intransitive
To produce an appropriate physical effect; to issue in the result designed by nature; especially (medicine) to take appropriate effect on the human system.
medicinetransitive or intransitive
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.
transitive
To bring about as an effect; to cause.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: (transitive or intransitive) To perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.
Used this way, operate is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is an engineering use: it is a working term used for accuracy on the job.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Technical/specialist writing
- Science
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use operate
- “The doctors operated on the patient but failed to save his life.”verb
- “Do not operate machinery after imbibing alcohol.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Similar Words, What’s the Difference?
Close in meaning, but not always interchangeable.
To exhaust, by working.
To interact mechanically.
To compete in a race.
Perform surgery on.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
Involved in a kind of operation.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
A symbol or function representing a mathematical operation.
Related to To perform a work or labour.
Related to To perform a work or labour.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A procedure for operating something or for dealing with a given situation.
A room in a hospital equipped for the performance of surgical operations.
A financial statement that gives operating results for a specific period.
A physician who specializes in surgery.
Software that controls the execution of computer programs and may provide various services.
Table on which the patient lies during a surgical operation.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: to perform a work or labour
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.