Skip to content
Allin

operate

verbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɒpəɹeɪt//
  • United States//ˈɑpəɹeɪt//

To perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.

verb

  1. 1

    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.

    The police had inside knowledge of how the gang operated.

  2. 2

    To produce an effect.

    We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.

  3. 3

    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.

    The drug operates by facilitating the negative neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), resulting in the blocking of neural long-term potentiation.

  4. 4

    To produce an effect. To act or produce an effect on the mind; to exert moral power or influence.

    The Virtues of private Perſons, how Bright and Exemplary ſoever, operate but on Few; on thoſe only who are near enough to obſerve, and inclin'd to imitate them: their ſphere of Action is narrow, and their Influence is confin'd to it.

    A plain, convincing reason operates on the mind both of a learned and ignorant hearer as long as they live.

  5. 5

    To bring about as an effect; to cause.

    Strictures upon style, which are for the most part good, but time has operated a change in many respects even since he wrote.

    It is supposed that western Europe was overpopulated and that the crusades operated a beneficial reduction of numbers.

  6. 6

    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.

  7. 7

    To deal in stocks or any commodity with a view to speculative profits.

  8. 8

    To put into, or to continue in, operation or activity; to work.

    to operate a machine

    to operate a system

    to operate a casino

    Termokarstovoye is 250 km east of Tarkosale where Novatek operates a processing facility for its own onshore production.

Etymology

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).

Forms

past tense
operated
past participle
operated
present participle
operating
third person singular
operates
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).