Which Came First, Editor or Edit? Words Built Backwards
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
Speakers sometimes strip an ending off a word on the assumption that a shorter form must have existed, and create that shorter form by doing so. Several extremely common verbs arrived this way.
How the process works
Words are usually built by adding to a shorter form, so a verb produces an agent noun by adding an ending. Speakers who know that pattern and encounter a long word that appears to fit it will assume the shorter form exists, and will use it, which creates it. The word editor entered English from Latin as a whole, with no English verb behind it, and speakers produced the verb edit by removing what looked like an ending. The result is a word that appears to be the ancestor of the one it came from, which is why the process is named as it is and why the history reverses the apparent relationship.
Familiar examples
A surprising number of ordinary words arrived this way:
- •Edit, from editor
- •Burgle, from burglar
- •Diagnose, from diagnosis
- •Donate, from donation
- •Televise, from television
- •Enthuse, from enthusiasm
- •Liaise, from liaison
- •Sculpt, from sculptor
The ones that fooled everybody
The most interesting cases involve a word whose final sound was mistaken for a plural ending, so that speakers produced a new singular that had never existed. Pea comes from pease, which was a singular mass noun for the vegetable and was reinterpreted as a plural, leaving a singular behind. Cherry comes from the French cerise, treated the same way. The word for a certain infectious disease with a name ending in the same sound produced comparable confusion. Each of these is now entirely standard and the original form survives only in fixed phrases or in dialect, which shows how completely such a reinterpretation can succeed once it spreads.
The related ways words get made
This is one of several processes that produce new words by taking existing ones apart, and the neighbours are worth distinguishing. Clipping simply shortens a word without changing its class, giving phone from telephone and exam from examination, and it creates no new grammatical form. Blending fuses two words into one, giving brunch and smog. Conversion moves a word from one class to another with no change of shape at all, which is how a noun becomes a verb in English constantly and is the most productive process of all. Acronyms take initial letters and occasionally become ordinary words that nobody parses as abbreviations. What distinguishes the process described here is that it invents a history, producing a form that looks like an ancestor and is a descendant.
Why some are resented
New formations of this kind attract objection reliably, and the pattern of objection is more revealing than the objection itself. Words created this way within living memory sound wrong to people who remember their absence, and several of the examples above were denounced as illiterate when they appeared, with donate and enthuse both attracting sustained criticism in the nineteenth century. Words created the same way centuries earlier attract no comment at all, because nobody alive remembers otherwise. The objection is therefore to novelty rather than to the process, which has been operating continuously throughout the history of the language and has supplied a great many words that even the most careful writers use without noticing.
The takeaway
Speakers strip what looks like an ending from a word on the assumption that a shorter form must exist, and the assumption creates it, which reverses the apparent relationship between the two. Edit, burgle, diagnose, donate and televise all arrived this way. Pea and cherry came from forms whose final sound was mistaken for a plural. The objections reliably target recent examples and ignore identical older ones.