Other forms: facilitated, facilitating, facilitates
To facilitate something is to make it easier to happen. A grant facilitates research, a bridge facilitates trade, a good chair facilitates a difficult meeting.
It is a formal word and it belongs to reports and proposals rather than conversation — help is what you say out loud. Two things are worth noticing. Facilitate takes a thing, not a person: you facilitate a process and you help a person, and facilitate somebody is a common and grating error. And in meetings, to facilitate has acquired a specific job — a facilitator runs the session without taking a side in it, which is different from chairing and very different from leading.
1verbfacilitateTo make something easier to do or to happen.
“The new software facilitates booking from a phone.”
2verbguideTo guide a meeting or discussion without directing its outcome.
“She facilitated the workshop and said almost nothing.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
facilitate is a way of helping.
Latin facilis meant easy, from facere, to do or make — a thing is easy when it can be done. The same root gives faculty, faculty of speech, and facility, which was originally the quality of being easy and is now the building.
Latin
facilis
French
faciliter — facilitate
English, today
facilitate
Anglicisation of French faciliter (“facilitate”) through -ate, ultimately from Latin facilis.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA