New verbs in English are often created by adding the suffix -ize or -ise to an existing noun or adjective. Browsing the recent entries in Macmillan’s crowd-sourced Open Dictionary, I see an abundance of such verbs: apostacize, blockchainize, Canadianize, diarize, disincentivize, estheticize, exoticize, gourmandize, Hispanicize, marmalize, proportionize, visibilize, winsorize.
When I typed this list, most of the words received a red underline in my word processor. The software’s dictionary does not recognize them, because they’re either new or obscure – as all words originally are. But this points to a common source of complaint: that these coinages are ‘ugly’ or ‘unnecessary’.
Garner’s Modern English Usage, for example, says that ‘neologisms ending in -ize are generally to be discouraged, for they are usually ungainly and often superfluous’. Ernest Gowers, in his revised edition of Fowler’s usage dictionary, wrote that while verbing with –ize is ‘useful and unexceptionable’ up to a point, it is done ‘with a freedom beyond reason’ and that most of the results are ‘inelegant’. Language users: know your limits!
The third edition of Fowler’s has a more progressive attitude. ‘There is always the danger of forming misleading impressions about such verbs,’ wrote its editor, Robert Burchfield. ‘One must be careful not to give the thumbs down to words simply because one has not encountered them before.’ And who can decide which words are ‘unnecessary’?
Certainly there are contexts where a writer or speaker should think twice about using a new or strange-sounding -ize word. But in the everyday exchange of language, there are no overriding reasons to avoid them; indeed, they can be a sign of linguistic play and creativity. As I’ve said before, unless you’re using language in a formal capacity, it’s yours to manipulate as you please.
Keep in mind too that words that seem new may be older than you think. Diarize is about two centuries old, while hospitalize, which the OED says is ‘frequently commented on as an unhappy formation’, dates to at least 1901. Materialize, dismissed by one 20th-century critic as ‘slang that should be avoided’, was used as early as 1710.
Then there is the vexed question of spelling. The –ise suffix comes from French, –ize from the earlier Greek. Popular lore says simplistically that -ize is American and -ise British. American English does mandate -ize, but it’s also standard in British usage and is the default for some publishers, including Macmillan and Oxford. British English also uses -ise, and it is house style for some newspapers and magazines, such as the Guardian and Economist. Englishes around the world use either.
The main thing is to be consistent in a given context, and to watch out for the words that always take -ise. These include advertise, advise, apprise, arise, chastise, comprise, compromise, demise, despise, devise, disguise, enfranchise, enterprise, excise, exercise, improvise, incise, merchandise, prise, revise, supervise, surmise, surprise, and televise.
Now go forth and verbalize.
It’s worth noting that AmE is unique in its use of -yze as in analyze; in all other countries it is -yse.
So ‘surprise’ is on the list of words that always end in -ise? Even in American English? The Webster dictionary seems to acknowledge the ‘surprize’ variant (although it doesn’t see ‘surprise’ as British spelling). What does that mean?
That’s a good one to note, John. It wasn’t always thus, of course: Samuel Johnson styled it as analyze in his Dictionary.
Sarah: Surprize has become something of a historical curiosity. Merriam-Webster does include it as an uncommon variant, but it’s not listed in other major US English dictionaries like the American Heritage Dictionary, and it’s a spelling I hardly ever see. The OED has citations with surprize from times past, but usage tapered off drastically in the early 19th century: see this Google Ngrams graph. Nowadays it can “justifiably be regarded as an error”, according to Bryan Garner in his Modern English Usage. Some may disagree, but I would advise caution in its use, at least in formal contexts.
The rule I was taught (in England) is simple … Greek stem = ize, Latin stem = ise … Hence:
Maximise
Synchronize
What is used in other English speaking countries is of course likely to be different.
Modern words can still be sorted this way.
Thanks for your interesting comment, Jeff. As Stan points out in his post, preference for -ise and -ize varies in different countries and in different publications; Macmillan and Oxford house style is -ize, for example. As an editor I would standardise/-ize spelling in a text I was correcting, unless the author or publisher had a different preference, such as the one you mention. If you wrote for Macmillan or Oxford, however, all your ‘-ises’ would become ‘-izes’, unless of course they end words such as ‘advertise’ that only allow one spelling in all varieties.
Jeff: That’s an interesting rule – eccentric, even – but not, I think, a helpful one. For writers and editors it would require knowledge of classical languages or unnecessary effort to look up and apply the different spellings; more importantly, it would be distracting for readers to see the resulting variation within a text.