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Allin

contribute

verbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//kənˈt(ʃ)ɹɪb.juːt//
  • United Kingdom//ˈkɒn.t(ʃ)ɹɪˌbjuːt//
  • United Kingdom//kənˈt͡ʃɹɪbjʉwt//
  • United Kingdom//ˈkɔnt͡ʃɹɪbjʉwt//

To give something that is or becomes part of a larger whole.

verb

  1. 1

    To give something that is or becomes part of a larger whole.

    to contribute money to a church fund

    to contribute articles to a journal

    That principle carried out consistently and logically, makes the individual not a claimant upon society, but a benefiter of it. He contributes whatever talent, natural or acquired, he may have, cheerfully to the promotion of the common good, […]

    Rivera retired the next three batters in order, with third baseman Alex Rodriguez contributing a nifty barehand pickup and throw on Julio Lugo’s roller.

Etymology

PIE word *tréyes From Latin contribūtus, perfect passive participle of contribuō (“to bring together; to unite”), from con- (“together”) + tribuō (“to bestow”), from tribus (“tribe”), derived from trēs (“three”), from Proto-Italic *trēs, from Proto-Indo-European *tréyes.

Forms

past tense
contributed
past participle
contributed
present participle
contributing
third person singular
contributes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).