Oh my word!!

Collaborate and Cooperate are not interchangeable words but they have one meaning in common which is to work for a common purpose or achieve a shared goal. Collaborate means team up, join forces, participate; to create or produce something. The top two agricultural research institutes, ICAR and ICRISAT, are collaborating to develop disease and drought-resistant groundnut seeds.

An archaeologist and anthropologist are collaborating to come out with a unique map of India. Their collaboration is receiving support from the UNICEF. Another meaning of collaborate, which is derogatory, is to collude, to conspire and to help enemy forces at the time of war or assisting the forces of the occupying country. The Colonel was suspended from the services for collaborating with neighbouring forces.

Few French military men collaborated with German intelligentsia during the World War II. Derivatives: collaborates, collaborated, collaborating, collaboration, collaborations, collaborator. “Both Amos and I were critical and argumentative, he even more than I, but during the years of our collaboration neither of us ever rejected out of hand anything the other said. Indeed, one of the great joys I found in the collaboration was that Amos frequently saw the point of my vague ideas much more clearly than I did.” - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

“India, Bhutan power plant collaborations in limbo,” reports Sunday Business Standard 9 June 2013 Cooperate means working together with another or others (My friends cooperated with me to raise money for my sister’s marriage), being helpful or assisting others when someone approaches you (If the municipal office cooperates with us we can get have litter-free streets in the town but there are no cooperators in the office so better to approach councilors).

Cooperate and collaborate both means working together but cooperate differs with collaborate which has another meaning i.e. to conspire or collude or to working with an enemy. Cooperate is written with hyphen as well (co-operate, please). Derivatives: cooperate, cooperates, cooperator, cooperation, cooperative (adjective: willing to be helpful), cooperant (adjective).

“The US administration’s experience in dealing with corporate frauds could help India in strengthening its corporate governance and regulatory mechanism as the collaboration between the Indian and the U.S. governments, besides cooperation between public and private institutions, is all set to get a further boost.” - The Hindu Thursday, 4 July, 2013

Derivates: corroborates, corroboration, corroborative (adjective: corroborative reports, evidence, etc). The communist countries have experimented with cooperative farming for higher yields but that collaboration between the state and the farmers did not corroborate that the land was utilized efficiently.

By: Kovuuri G. Reddy