the.com/cohort
a herd moving through time together, sharing a fate they didn't sign up for
means A group of people sharing a common characteristic or experience over a period of time — especially a band of companions, or in research a set of subjects tracked together.
from From Latin 'cohors,' a yard or enclosure — the same word for a pen where livestock were gathered. The Romans applied it to a unit of soldiers, roughly a tenth of a legion, penned together by duty. It entered English through Old French, and over time the military rank faded while the sense of 'a crowd that belongs together' stayed; the looser modern meaning of 'a companion or accomplice' is a later, more casual drift.
- roman roots
- originally a Roman military unit of ~480 soldiers
- tenth share
- ten cohorts made up one legion
- science use
- epidemiologists track cohorts to find disease causes
- startup speak
- signups grouped by month to measure who stays
- word kinship
- shares a root with the homely word court
framingham heart study cohort — 5,209 residents of framingham, massachusetts enrolled in 1948 to study cardiovascular disease over 70+ years
millennials born 1981-1996 — demographic cohort analyzed across 2.6 million births with distinct cultural markers and economic outcomes