Utilise vs Operate - What's the difference?
utilise | operate |
To make useful, to find a practical use for.
To make (l) of; to use.
To make best use of; to use to its fullest extent, potential, or ability.
To make do with; to use in manner different from that originally intendedT.A.R. Cheney, Getting the Words Right , Writer's Digest Books (1983).
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(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.
* Atterbury
* Jonathan Swift
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.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01, author=Robert L. Dorit, volume=100, issue=1, page=23
, magazine=
, title= (transitive, or, intransitive) To put into, or to continue in, operation or activity; to work.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-14, author=(Jonathan Freedland)
, volume=189, issue=1, page=18, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly)
, title=
As verbs the difference between utilise and operate
is that utilise is while operate is (transitive|or|intransitive) to perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.As an adjective utilise
is used, in use.utilise
English
Alternative forms
* utilizeVerb
(utilis)Usage notes
Many style guides have advised against utilize and utilise'', arguing that the simpler verb use is always preferable (and analogously, that the noun ''use'' is preferable to ''utilization'' and ''utilisation'').Sir Ernest Gowers 1965 ''The Complete Plain Words'' Oxford: Oxford University PressEric Partridge 1973 ''Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English'' England: Penguin BooksJohn E. Kahn (ed) 1985 ''The Right Word at the Right Time'' London:Readers DigestPam Peters 1995 ''The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide'' Cambridge:Cambridge University Press When used simply as a synonym in ordinary writing (as in “please ''utilise the rear door when exiting the aircraft”) it can strike readers as pretentious, and so should be used sparingly.New Oxford American Dictionary 3rd edition (c) 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. American novelist (David Foster Wallace) calls it a puff word.He continues: "Since it does nothing that good old use doesn't do, its extra letters and syllables don't make a writer seem smarter. I tell my students that using utilize makes you seem either pompous or so insecure that you'll use pointlessly big words in an attempt to look smart." Others argue that utilise has other senses, and is acceptable or even necessary (instead of (term)) in such senses. One such sense is “make best use of” (profitable, practical use, not just general use), as in “if we fail to utilise all resources, we will fail” – here the nuance is not simply “use”, but “make best use of”. Further, in American usage, (term) can imply use outside an object’s intended purpose.Synonyms
* employ * exploit * useDerived terms
* (l) * (l) * (l)References
operate
English
Verb
(operat)- The virtues of private persons operate but on a few.
- A plain, convincing reason operates on the mind both of a learned and ignorant hearer as long as they live.
Rereading Darwin, passage=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.}}
- to operate a machine
Obama's once hip brand is now tainted, passage=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.}}