facilitate
Americanverb (used with object)
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facilitates,
present (3rd person singular)
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facilitated,
past participle, past
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facilitating
present participle
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to make easier or less difficult; help forward (an action, a process, etc.).
Careful planning facilitates any kind of work.
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to lead or moderate (a discussion, workshop, etc.), especially as a person trained to do so.
An instructor will facilitate the online discussions, providing students with the questions beforehand.
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to assist the progress of (a person).
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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facilitatesimple
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facilitatessimple
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have facilitatedperfect
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has facilitatedperfect
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am facilitatingprogressive
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are facilitatingprogressive
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is facilitatingprogressive
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have been facilitatingperfect progressive
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has been facilitatingperfect progressive
Past
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facilitatedsimple
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had facilitatedperfect
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was facilitatingprogressive
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were facilitatingprogressive
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had been facilitatingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of facilitate
First recorded in 1605–15; facilit(y) + -ate 1
Explanation
To facilitate means to make something easier. If your best friend is very shy, you could facilitate her efforts to meet new people. Facilitate comes from the Latin facilis, for "easy." It means to make something easier or more likely to happen. You facilitate growth or a process, as opposed to, say, dinner. Often in business meetings someone will be assigned to facilitate a discussion so people don't just sit in awkward silence. Synonyms are ease, simplify, expedite, and assist.
Vocabulary lists containing facilitate
Essential Academic Vocabulary for High School Students, List 3
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Make Do: Fac
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The measure folds in five proposals, including to consolidate the city’s planning department, to facilitate building and opening businesses in the city.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 4, 2026
Seaports China has financed around the world facilitate its globe-spanning trade.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 2, 2026
Gu says that deals financed with expensive stock can be a problem for investors in the company that’s issuing shares to facilitate the transaction, in this case Marvell.
From MarketWatch ● Nov. 2, 2026
Monaco introduced an offence of presumed money laundering to facilitate the prosecution of cases involving suspicious funds.
From Barron's ● Oct. 30, 2026
Andrew Mlangeni, the last accused, made an unsworn state-ment admitting that he carried messages and instructions for MK and had disguised himself as a priest to facilitate this work.
From "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela
"Our findings suggest that conjoint exercise facilitates, in a small but significant way, the ability to resolve conflict peacefully," Yorgason said.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 6, 2026
Aviation and the tourism it facilitates generated economic activity equivalent to 27% of the emirate’s gross domestic product in 2023, according to a study by Oxford Economics.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 4, 2026
The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency says it facilitates clinical research, but it is still too early to know whether psychedelic treatments might one day become routinely available.
From BBC ● Sep. 29, 2026
Laurent Schwartz, president of the Paris-based National Gold Counter, which facilitates gold trading in France, said central banks had been moving their reserves around for about a decade.
From Barron's ● Sep. 2, 2026
For the plant the change is highly disadvantageous, but it facilitates harvest by humans—the grain waits on the stem to be collected.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
Agents wanted Kao to help them find more records that would back up his account and asked him to point them toward lobbyists in D.C. who he said facilitated the pay-for-play scheme.
From Salon ● Oct. 20, 2026
The app features a generous free usage option along with paid subscription tiers, and Meta plans eventually to monetize the agent by taking a cut of sales facilitated by the agent.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 20, 2026
In an exclusive interview with the BBC from prison in Kyiv, facilitated by his lawyer, Vitalii Zhykovych has given his own account of the attempted assassination for the first time.
From BBC ● Oct. 8, 2026
Still, “the colleagues who facilitated his ouster accuse him of a degree of deception that is untenable for any executive and dangerous for a leader of such a transformative technology.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 8, 2026
The beam not only facilitated more sophisticated experiments but also provided a new “vaudeville” for Lawrence to exploit, for it never failed to elicit gasps of astonishment from his visitors.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
The bank, Zhejiang Chouzhou Commercial Bank, was flagged internally by U.S. officials during both the Biden and Trump administrations for facilitating transactions that appeared designed to evade sanctions, former officials said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 3, 2026
Experts have also pointed to land-clearing practices used to make room for plantations as another factor facilitating the spread of wildfires in Indonesia, with naturally fire-resistant forests replaced by less dense and shaded vegetation.
From BBC ● Oct. 11, 2026
"Are they happening together or not? At which molecular site? And how is the water network facilitating the proton hop?"
From Science Daily ● Oct. 6, 2026
It does still bar them from knowingly or recklessly facilitating such sales, and it requires them to take “reasonable measures” to prevent them.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 28, 2026
Hubler could make hundreds of millions facilitating the idiocy of Morgan Stanley’s customers.
From "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
