Co-respondent - correspondent

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Be careful to use the one of these that you mean. Although they look very similar, and sound the same except when a careful speaker seeks to distinguish between them, they have very different meanings.

  • co-respondent is a word of restricted meaning. In law, it meant the adulterous partner of a person being sued for divorce. If Mr Smith tried to divorce his wife claiming that she had been unfaithful with Mr Jones, she (the wife) was the respondent. Mr Jones was the co-respondent. Since the reforms in UK divorce law in the last half of the twentieth century, this term is now little heard in Britain.
  • correspondent is a word of much wider use. It is derived from the verb to correspond, which has a number of meanings. The person with whom you exchange letters is a correspondent, which is a noun. A collection of letters is called correspondence, and that is the spelling for any of the meanings you might find in academic English - there is no recorded occurrence in OED of a word co-respondence.
  • There is also an adjective correspondent which can usually be replaced by the English participle corresponding: "The organ correspondent to the human arm in birds is the wing". This could just as well be "The organ corresponding to the human arm in birds is the wing". (Biologists might say "the homologue of the arm in birds is the wing".)

Don't refer to someone from whom you have received a letter as "my co-respondent". This could lead to gossip.