I saw this in a legal book I’m proofreading and totally thought it was a typo (Microsoft Word agreed with me and gave it an angry red underline) or, failing that, an obscure Harry Potter spell, neither of which belong in a book on medical negligence. After looking it up I now know that equiparate is a verb that means ‘to compare’ (turns out that neither MS Word or I know all the words).
The reason Word and I didn’t recognise might be because it’s fallen out of fashion – the dictionary has it marked as ‘obsolete’. Just think though – if language had gone down a slightly different path, we might all have been getting annoyed with the fat opera man singing ‘go equiparate, go equiparate’ (I bet you’re doing that now, aren’t you?).
Okay, technically speaking, its meaning is actually closer to ‘equate’ than ‘compare’. But that didn’t work with my joke, so I hope you’ll forgive me.