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committee

UK/kəˈmɪt.i/US/kəˈmɪt.i/
nounB2Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,406 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: committees

A committee is a small group chosen to decide or report on something. Form a committee, the committee agreed, a select committee.

The jokes about them are earned and the reason is structural: a committee spreads responsibility so that nobody carries it, which is a defence as well as a fault. A select committee scrutinises government. Note the spelling, with two m's, two t's and two e's; and that the word comes from commit.

Definitions of committee

  1. 1nouncommitteeA small group chosen to decide or report on something.B2

    “A committee of parents and teachers will decide how to spend the money.”

committee is a group.

Where it comes from

Commit plus -ee, or from an Anglo-Norman past participle. Commit comes from Latin committere, to entrust.

  1. Latin

    committere

  2. Anglo-Norman

    commite

  3. English, today

    committee

Built from

  • commettre · Old French — to commit
  • con- · Latin — with
  • mittere · Latin — to send

From commit + -ee. From commit + ee, or else revival of Anglo-Norman commite, past participle of commettre (“to commit”), from Latin committere, from con- (“with”) + mittere (“to send”). The OED3 prefers the first etymology.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

committee in the wild

  • A committee may not itself be considered to be a form of assembly or a decision-making body.

    Committee

  • The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives created in 1938.

    House Un-American Activities Committee

  • The bankers' committee still held 5,108,000 bags of this.

    All about coffee· William H. Ukers

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

the mittere family

promiseadmit

committee — used about once every 152 pages · #1,406 · point at the bar for the others

  • commit