Operate
Pronunciation
Origin
From Latin operatus, past participle of operari ("to work, labor, toil, have effect"), from opus, operis ("work, labor").
Full definition of operate
Verb
- (transitive or intransitive) To perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.
- (transitive or 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.
- (transitive or intransitive) To act or produce effect on the mind; to exert moral power or influence.
- AtterburyThe virtues of private persons operate but on a few.
- Jonathan SwiftA plain, convincing reason operates on the mind both of a learned and ignorant hearer as long as they live.
- (medicine, transitive 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 or intransitive) To deal in stocks or any commodity with a view to speculative profits.
- (transitive or intransitive) To produce, as an effect; to cause.
- 2012-01, Robert L. Dorit, Rereading Darwin, 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.
- (transitive or intransitive) To put into, or to continue in, operation or activity; to work.to operate a machine
- 2013-06-14, Jonathan Freedland, Obama's once hip brand is now tainted, Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet.