What does CO stand for in COBOL?

COBOL stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language, so the "CO" at the start of the name is simply short for the word Common.

The name reflects the language's original design goal, it was created to be a shared, standardised programming language that many different businesses and organisations could use for their data processing needs, rather than each business inventing its own separate language. "Common" signals that the language was meant to be broadly usable across the business world.

"Common object", "computer oriented", and "common operating" are not accurate expansions of the abbreviation, they either add words that are not part of the acronym or replace "business" with an unrelated term, neither matches the actual expansion of COBOL.

Exam tip: remember COBOL by expanding the whole acronym together, Common Business Oriented Language, this makes it easy to see that "CO" is simply "Common."