Meaning & use
syndicate
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Meanings
nouncountable
A group of people or companies that join together to run a project or share the cost and profit of a business venture.
Grammar: Takes a singular or plural verb in British English when it names a group of people.
Patterns
- a syndicate of something
- form a syndicate
A syndicate of local investors bought the old hotel.
Five coworkers formed a lottery syndicate.
The bank put together a syndicate to fund the pipeline.
nouncountabledisapproving
An organized criminal group, especially one that runs illegal businesses.
Grammar: Usually appears in compounds such as crime syndicate or drug syndicate.
Patterns
- a crime syndicate
Police broke up a smuggling syndicate operating from the port.
The film follows a young detective chasing a crime syndicate.
A powerful syndicate controlled gambling in the city.
verbtransitive
To sell or distribute something such as a column, comic or television show to many newspapers or stations at the same time.
Grammar: Takes an object and is often used in the passive: the column is syndicated.
Patterns
- syndicate something to someone
- be syndicated in something
Her advice column is syndicated in over two hundred papers.
The cartoon was syndicated to stations around the country.
The network plans to syndicate the series next year.
Word forms
| plural | syndicates |
|---|---|
| third person singular | syndicates |
| past tense | syndicated |
| past participle | syndicated |
| -ing form | syndicating |
Common combinations
- crime syndicate
- The detective spent years investigating a crime syndicate.
- form a syndicate
- The farmers formed a syndicate to buy new equipment.
- lottery syndicate
- Our office lottery syndicate has never won more than ten dollars.
- syndicated column
- His syndicated column appears every Sunday.
- syndicate of investors
- A syndicate of investors backed the new stadium.
Synonyms and how they differ
- consortium
- Consortium is more formal and usually describes organizations pooling resources for a large project, not criminals.
- cartel
- Cartel suggests companies or criminals that agree to fix prices or control a market.
- gang
- Gang is informal and suggests a looser, smaller group, often criminal, with less business structure.
- pool
- Pool describes people putting money together, such as a betting pool, and is less formal and less structured.
Word family
- syndication noun
- selling a work to many outlets for publication or broadcast
- syndicated adjective
- distributed to many outlets
- syndicator noun
- a person or company that arranges syndication
Commonly confused: syndicate or syndrome?
syndicate vs syndrome
A syndrome is a group of symptoms that occur together, not a group of people.
Practice
Her weekly comic strip is ___ in newspapers across the country.
Choose one answer.
The passive is syndicated: the strip is distributed to many papers. Syndrome is a different noun, and the other forms do not fit the passive.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “syndicate”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.