operate

Etymology

From Latin operātus, past participle of operārī (“to work, labor, toil, have effect”), from opus, operis (“work, labor”).

verb

1. (transitive or intransitive) To perform a work or labour; to exert power or strength, physical or mechanical; to act.
   Could someone explain how this meeting operates?
   In this town, the garbage removal staff operate between six o'clock at midnight.
   The police had inside knowledge of how the gang operated.
2. (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.
   The drug operates by facilitating the negative neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), resulting in the blocking of neural long-term potentiation. 2010, Peter A. Frensch, Ralf Schwarzer, Cognition and Neuropsychology
3. (transitive or intransitive) To act or produce effect on the mind; to exert moral power or influence.
   A plain, convincing reason operates on the mind both of a learned and ignorant hearer as long as they live. 1720, Jonathan Swift, A Letter to a Young Clergyman
4. (medicine, transitive or intransitive) 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.
   The surgeon had to operate on her heart.
   I'm being operated tomorrow.
5. (transitive or intransitive) To deal in stocks or any commodity with a view to speculative profits.
6. (transitive or intransitive) To produce, as an effect; to cause.
   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. 2012-01, Robert L. Dorit, “Rereading Darwin”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 1, page 23
7. (transitive or intransitive) To put into, or to continue in, operation or activity; to work.
   to operate a machine
   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. 2013-06-14, Jonathan Freedland, “Obama's once hip brand is now tainted”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 1, page 18