pɛrɪˈhiːlɪən

perihelion: that point in the orbit of a planet, comet or other body at which it is closest to the sun

Well, time flies. Back on January 4, when the Earth was at its closest to the sun, I started off to write about words relating to perihelion, and got side-tracked into writing about astronomical terminology instead. So now I’m just catching up with the original plan.

Perihelion, I reported last time, comes from the Greek prefix peri-, meaning “around” or “close”, and helios, “sun”. And its opposite is aphelion, which comes from the prefix apo-, meaning “off” or “away”.

Medicine, biology and architecture have a lot of peri- and apo- words, and I’m not going to try to list all that specialist vocabulary—I’ll stick to general vocabulary, albeit with an occasional diversion into the obscure.

A perimeter as literally a “measure around”, a periphery is a “carry around”, and a period is a “way around”. The last one was originally used to designate any kind of cycle in time—the four-year recurrence of the Olympic Games, the longer cycles of planetary movements. Later, by associations with cycles ending and beginning again, period acquired a sense of completion—you could talk about a time period that didn’t recur. In rhetoric people called a complete spoken sentence a period, and from there the word trickled down to eventually attach itself to the punctuation mark with which we end a written sentence.

A periscope lets you look around, peristrophe is the business of turning around, and a peripatus is a place where you can walk around—it gives us the verb peripatize, to walk around, and the adjective peripatetic, given to walking. Aristotle used to walk around the peripatus in the Lyceum while he was teaching—so the word Peripatetic is also used to designate his particular school of philosophy. A periapt is something “fastened around”—a personal ornament or charm. A peristyle is a row of columns around the outside of a building, or the space they enclose. Periegesis is the act of “guiding around”, so it’s a fancy word for a guidebook; while periplus is the act of “sailing around”, which gives us the name for a description of a sea voyage. The Periplus of The Erythryaean Sea is a first-century Greek text, describing the trading ports in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, which is a striking indication of how far-faring European navigators were in those days.

Periphrasis is “declaring around”—the rhetorical device of using a lot of words instead of a few. It has a Latin synonym in circumlocution. Someone given to periphrasis is a periphrast. (Calling your opponent in an argument “a bit of a periphrast” is a fine way to spread puzzled consternation.)

In a previous post I’ve already mentioned periscian, which means “around shadow”—it’s a designation for someone who lives within one of the polar circles, who therefore will have at least one day a year of continuous sunlight, during which their shadow will be cast successively in all directions as the sun sweeps around the horizon. Now it’s time to mention the periœci, from the Greek perioikos, “living around”—it’s a handy word for people or places that are on the same parallel of latitude, but on opposite meridians of longitude. (Pronounce it pɛrɪˈiːsaɪ.) It has an opposite, of sorts, in antœci, “living opposite”, which designates people or places on the same meridian of longitude but opposite parallels of latitude.

On, then, to apo-.

An apograph is something “written away”—an exact copy of a document, in the days of hand copying, which could be sent off somewhere else. Whereas an apology was something “spoken away”—an attempt to make something to go away by talking about it. It was originally a verbal defence of a person or idea. Someone who delivers such an apology is an apologist. The word apologist has retained the original sense of “defence”, whereas apology has become associated with contrition—a rich source of potential confusion over meanings. Apopemptic refers to something “sent away”—an apopemptic monologue is the Greek equivalent of a Latin valedictory address.

An apocalypse is literally the act of taking the cover off something (from Greek calyptra, “cover”)—a revelation, in other words. The biblical Book of Revelation is also called The Apocalypse Of John—and because the revelation the book’s author describes is about the end of the world, that’s what apocalypse has now come to mean. Staying on the religious theme a little longer, something that is apocryphal is literally “hidden away” or concealed (from Greek kryptos, “hidden”). When the Bible was first being assembled, Christian writings with unknown or dubious authorship were called Apocrypha. And because such writings could not be trusted or were deemed false, that’s what apocryphal now means. An apostle is someone who is “sent off”—a messenger; in the biblical sense, someone who carried the message of Christianity to other lands. An apostate is someone who “stands off”—who abandons a previously held belief. It used to have a female equivalent, an apostatrice, but that’s not much used nowadays. And to undergo an apotheosis is literally to “god off”—to become a god; something the Roman emperors did with monotonous regularity. Nowadays it can also mean some sort of transition to a heavenly afterlife or state of bliss.

An apothec is place where things are “stored away” (from Greek theke, “box”)—a storehouse or shop. So an apothecary used to be simply a shop-keeper; the word only later took on the sense of a person who sold drugs and potions specifically.

Apoplexy is a “striking off”—an old word for the sudden disability caused by a stroke. Something apotropaic causes a “turning away”—the word is used to designate a charm, spell, prayer or ceremony intended to ward off evil. And something aposematic causes a “warning off”—it’s the word for the bright colouration affected by some venomous creatures (or creatures just pretending to be venomous), and in that sense it’s the opposite of cryptic, which is used for colouration that serves to conceal the animal.

There are an impressive three rhetorical devices named using apo-. First there’s apophasis, which means “speaking away” or denial—it’s the trick of urging a course of action while pretending to deprecate it (“I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that …”). The splendid aposiopesis (“silence away”) is the name for the action of falling silent once the audience knows exactly what you mean, but before you actually have to say it (“And if that happens, only one course of action is open to us …”). And apostrophe (“turning away”) is the act of breaking off a speech in order to address some absent party (“And I would say this to our opponents …”). The punctuation mark, the apostrophe, has the same etymology. It was originally (and still is) used to indicate where a letter has been “turned away”—that is, missed out.

Finally, I can’t resist mentioning apophthegm, which comes from Greek phtheggomai, “to raise one’s voice”. It’s pronounced ˈæpəθɪm, and although it looks like it might be a synonym for some sort of coughing or spitting, it just means “a pithy saying”. If you’re given to pithy sayings, you are an apophthegmatist, and you apophthegmatize. Who wouldn’t aspire to such a thing?

That’s all for now. Maybe I’ll come back to words relating to the sun in another post. I hope before the next perihelion.

I was trying to explain the content of this blog to someone the other day, and I said that it combined two states of mind, the magpie and the grasshopper—the magpie’s hoarding of appealing objects, the grasshopper’s leaping from place to place

And that, in a self-referential kind of way, got me thinking about the words magpie and grasshopper.

The magpie is a common enough European bird, recognizable by its black-and-white plumage, long tail and rather sinister chuckling call. When I was child you never saw them in Dundee, but during a drive to the west one of them always seemed to show up just outside Glasgow. However, in the last decade they seem to have decided to colonize the Tay estuary, and nowadays I can usually hear a pair of them chortling from the rooftops just down the road.

Their acquisitive nature made them a metaphor for hoarders and collectors, and they gave their name to a 1970s children’s TV programme from Thames Television:

In those days, you were either a follower of the BBC’s staid Blue Peter, or ITV’s very slightly psychedelic Magpie. I was a Magpie kid, and nursed an enthusiasm for Susan Stranks, who was in every way superior to Blue Peter’s Val Singleton, at least in my estimation.

The magpie was original just called a pie. The word was adopted from Old French pie, which in turn came from the Latin name for the bird, pica (preserved in the Eurasian magpie’s scientific name, Pica pica). If something was particoloured, like the bird, it was pied—a word that’s now preserved pretty much single-handedly by the story known in English as “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. The mysterious piper in the mediaeval story wore a particoloured suit of clothes—in Robert Browning’s version:

His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red

The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842)

The variation piebald has survived better, in application to particoloured horses (the “bald” bit coming from a very old usage, designating a horse with a white blaze on its forehead).

Some time around the turn of the sixteenth century, there seems to have been a vogue for applying given names to common bird species: so we had a Jenny wren, a Robin redbreast, a Jack daw, a Tom tit … and a Margaret pie. Shakespeare disconcertingly turned this into maggot-pie in Macbeth, but the version that persisted was Mag pie. Eventually (like Jack daw), the old name of the bird was forgotten, and it became just plain magpie.

Its Latin name, pica, is a medical term, designating a desire to eat something that isn’t normally considered food (a reference to the magpie’s supposedly indiscriminate appetite). Under the umbrella of pica fall such practices as coprophagy (eating faeces), geophagy (eating earth), ryphophagy (eating “filth”, which I suppose could involve either or both of the preceding), onychophagy (nail biting) and trichophagy (eating hair). This last practice can give rise to a fibrous mass of undigested hair sitting in the stomach, called a trichobezoar or just bezoar.

Bezoar comes from Persian pad-zahr, “against poison”—the original Persian bezoars were concretions taken from the guts of various ruminants, which were held to prevent poisoning if they were dropped into a cup before drinking from it. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the most prized bezoar was the lapis bezoar orientale, taken from Persian wild goats; inferior products were the lapis bezoar occidentale, from the Peruvian llama, and the German bezoar, from the chamois. And who knows? Maybe the large surface area of those porous concretions really did absorb a bit of poison.

Grasshoppers, crickets and locusts tend to look alike and behave alike, and together they make up the insect order Orthoptera, “straight wings”. So if you’re not sure whether you have a grasshopper, a cricket or a locust in your hand, you can just nod wisely and call it an orthopter or an orthopteran. Something that resembles an orthopter is orthopterous or orthopteroid.

Grasshopper does what it says on the tin, etymologically speaking, and there’s not much more to add, beyond saying that grasshopperish and grasshoppery are both words meaning “like a grasshopper”, while grasshoppering is living improvidently, like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper.

Cricket is imitative in origin—something that goes krik! in the grass. Something like a cricket, or like the noise a cricket makes, is crickety. As far as we know, the insects have nothing to do with the game of cricket, which instead might possibly derived from a kind of footstool called a cricket, and a ball game called “stool-ball”, which (you’ve guessed it) involved throwing a ball at a stool. Then again, it might not.

Locust is from the Latin locusta, which was a word applied to locusts and grasshoppers, but also to lobsters and other crustaceans. Something pertaining to a locust is either locustal, locustian or locustical, so you’re spoiled for choice there.

From locusta and its Latin application to lobsters, the Spanish got langosta (a lobster or crayfish) and its diminutive langostino, by which they designate the small lobster Nephrops norvegicus, otherwise known in English as the Norwegian lobster or the Dublin Bay prawn. The French went down essentially the same etymological route, using langouste for the crayfish and langoustine for the Norwegian lobster. Langoustine is a name that seems to turn up fairly regularly on menus in the UK these days, except when they’re fried in batter and served with tartare sauce, in which case they’re scampi—the plural of scampo, the Italian word for the Norwegian lobster.

The English word lobster also derives from Latin locusta, which was mangled in Old English to loppestre (presumably by someone quite hard of hearing). Lobstering is fishing for lobsters; lobsterish means “red faced”, like a cooked lobster; and to lobsterize is to walk backwards, in the way lobsters are said to do, by people who have never seen a lobster walking.

And I guess all of the above is as good an example as any, of how this blog tends to be both magpie- and grasshopper-minded.

ˈjuːltaɪd

Yuletide: The Christmas season

Yule is a bit of an etymological orphan. The origins of the word are obscure, but it seems to have been the name of a twelve-day pagan winter festival, celebrated among the ancient speakers of the Germanic language family, and called jól in Old Norse*. As with many other pagan festivals, it was later hijacked by Christianity, so the word yule became synonymous with Christmas and Christmas celebrations. The only words it has spawned in English are compounds: yule-log (a log traditionally burned in the hearth at Christmas, and surely a relic of yule’s pagan past), yule-song (another name for Christmas carols), and of course yuletide—Christmas time.

The use of tide to mean “the time at which something happens” is ancient, and precedes its present meaning. So we have eventide, “evening time”; Christmastide, “Christmas time” and Lammastide, the Scottish Lammas festival on August 1st. And we used to have St Andrew’s tide, and similar names for all manner of other saint’s days; summer’s tide, and all the other seasons; and even April-tide, May-tide and so on through the months.

Something that happened in a timely manner was tidy. That word has gradually crept away from all association with time, at first coming to mean “satisfactory” (still with us in phrases like, “a tidy sum of money”), and finally “neat” or “orderly”.

Two archaic words that are still in occasional use preserve the original meaning of tide. If something betides you, it happens to you—nowadays, it seems to be only woe that betides anyone. And tidings are an announcement of something that has happened. In pleasing counterpoint to the woeful usage of betide, we have the Christmas phrase “good tidings of great joy” from the King James version of the gospel of Luke.

Round about the time of Chaucer, sailors began to refer to the times of high and low water at sea as the tides. (Prior to that, Old English had referred to the high water as flód and the low water as ebba—words that are with us still in the form of flood tide and ebb tide.) After a while, the association with time was lost, and the word tide became associated with the physical phenomenon itself.

But before that time, English had two words, time and tide, that meant approximately the same thing. The proverb “Time and tide wait for no man” has its origins during that period. So it has nothing to do with the tides of the sea—it’s warning us that time passes, and if we don’t get things done at their due time (their tide), we’ll have missed an opportunity that may not come again. (If you search the internet, you’d be forgiven for forming the idea that Geoffrey Chaucer originated the “time and tide” proverb. But he never wrote such a thing—what he did was to make references in his writing that suggest the phrase already existed in his time.)

When we see two words with similar sounds and similar meanings, it’s usually telling us that they have a common origin, but have arrived in English by different routes. And that’s the story with time and tide. They both go back to a reconstructed Indo-European root that sounded something like di-, which was associated with the meaning “to divide”. There was also an Indo-European root used to form abstract nouns from verbal roots: ti-. So the Indo-European root di-ti-, “an abstract thing that divides”, is what flowed down through the old Germanic languages to give us Old English tid, “tide”. However, if you combined Indo-European di- with mon-, “neck”, you got di-mon-, “a physical thing that divides” and it was Indo-European di-mon- that evolved into Germanic ti-mon- and then Old English tima, “time”, shedding its physical nature somewhere along the way.

The story with di- is a little more complicated, though. Indo-European indulged in various vowel shifts to generate various bits of grammar, and di- is actually a variant of the basic form, da-. Another variant of the same root, dai-, when attached to mon-, “neck”, evolved into the  Greek’s word daimon, designating a supernatural spirit that existed in the divide between humans and gods. That gave us the English word demon, for an evil supernatural creature. But we preserve the Greek sense with a slightly different spelling—dæmon, for a supernatural creature that is not (necessarily) evil in intent. Philip Pullman used the latter word extensively in the His Dark Materials trilogy.

And, come to think of it, you could probably make a case for Santa’s elves being dæmons, too.

* Modern Pagans still celebrate Yule, usually on a single day around the Northern Winter solstice. Opinion varies on whether to use 21st December every year, or to track the astronomical solstice more closely as it flips back and forth between the 21st and the 22nd with the leap years.

saɪn

sine: Originally, the length of a straight line drawn from one end of a circular arc parallel to the tangent at the other end, and terminated by the radius; in modern use, the ratio of this line to the radius

ˈsiːkənt

secant: Originally, the length of a straight line drawn from the centre of a circular arc through one end of the arc, and terminated by the tangent or line touching the arc at the other end; in modern use, the ratio of this line to the radius

ˈtænʤǝnt

tangent: Originally, the length of a straight line perpendicular to the radius touching one end of the arc and terminated by the secant drawn from the centre through the other end; in modern use, the ratio of this line to the radius

Yes, those definitions definitely need explanatory diagrams, and I’ll come to that in a minute. First, a bit of background.

The word trigonometry comes from Greek trigonon, “triangle”, and metria, “measurement”—it’s the mathematics of triangle measurement.

Back in the Dark Ages before electronic calculators and personal computers, there were things called trigonometric tables, which listed various properties of right-angled triangles—you looked up an angle of the triangle, and the table gave you the ratio of two of its sides. For a given angle, you could find out about the ratios of different sides of the triangle by checking the appropriate trigonometric function of that angle—functions with exotic names of obscure origin, like the ones listed at the head of this post. I still own a rather sexy set of trig. tables, which I take off the shelf and pat nostalgically from time to time.

The earliest trigonometrical tables we know of were prepared by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Nicaea, who lived in the second century BC. In a lost work entitled Ton en kukloi eutheion (Of Lines Inside A Circle), he listed the lengths of the chords of a circle of standard circumference, which he set at 21600 units (the number of arcminutes in 360º). He provided a length for chords drawn at regular angular increments of 45 units, which corresponds to 7.5º.

Here’s a diagram of one such angle and its corresponding chord:

Each chord formed the base of an isosceles triangle inscribed within the circle. If you understood that all triangles with the same angles have sides in similar ratios (which the Ancient Greeks did), then you could use the data from Hipparchus’s table to work out the length of the sides of other isosceles triangles with the same apex angle.

In fact, Hipparchus’s table worked exactly like the modern sine function. The only differences between the two are a simple matter of the multipliers involved:

• To work with Hipparchus’s table, you needed to first work out the radius of his standard 21600-unit circle, because two sides of his isosceles triangle are formed by radii of the standard circle. Modern trigonometric functions effectively set the radius of the circle to equal one, which is much easier for scaling.
• The “chord values” Hipparchus listed for each angle are, in modern terms, twice the sine of half the angle.

If we go back to the definition of sine at the head of this post, you can maybe see where “twice the sine of half the angle” comes from. Here’s the original definition again:

The length of a straight line drawn from one end of a circular arc parallel to the tangent at the other end, and terminated by the radius

It should be apparent from the diagram that the “sine line” is half the length of Hipparchus’s chord, and is based on half its central angle.

Sine comes from the Latin sinus, “bay”, and you can see the little bay that’s formed between the sine line and the arc of the circle.

Now, here’s the original secant definition again:

The length of a straight line drawn from the centre of a circular arc through one end of the arc, and terminated by the tangent or line touching the arc at the other end

Secant comes from Latin secare, “to cut”, because it cuts across the arc of the circle.

And the tangent was defined in terms of the secant:

The length of a straight line perpendicular to the radius touching one end of the arc and terminated by the secant drawn from the centre through the other end

Tangent comes from Latin tangere “to touch”, because it just touches the arc of the circle.

Each of these basic trigonometric functions had a complementary function, flagged by the prefix co-, which comes from a similar Latin prefix meaning “jointly” or “together”. So we also have cosine, cosecant and cotangent. I’m going to skate straight past the detailed meaning of these complementary functions, but it turns out that the six trigonometric functions  explore all possible ratios of the three sides of a right-angle triangle. Three of them are inverses of the other three:

cotangent = 1/tangent
cosecant = 1/sine
cosine = 1/secant

So you can do trigonometry using just three functions, one from each row above. Which is why, when I was at school, I never heard about secants—we used sine, cosine and tangent, and took inverses whenever we needed to.

But back to the original trio. We have sine, which forms a bay within the curve; secant, which cuts the curve; and tangent, which touches the curve. The obscure names actually make sense!

Latin sinus, “bay”, comes into English unchanged in the form of the sinuses in your head that can become inflamed with sinusitis. Each sinus air cavity has a narrow entrance and a broad inner extension, like a sheltered bay. Something that winds back and forth creating bay-like curves is sinuous or sinuate. The act of winding about is sinuation. And if we introduce an idea in a tortuous and winding fashion, we insinuate it.

Latin secare, “to cut”, gives us lots of cutting words ending in –sect. Bisect, trisect, quadrisect and quinquesect are the verbs for cutting something in two, three, four or five equal parts. To intersect is to cut across something, to dissect is to cut something up, to resect is to cut something out, and to prosect is to cut something in advance—the process of dissecting a specimen for an anatomical demonstration. To persecate is to cut, to desecate is to cut something free of entanglement, and secament is material that has been cut off something else (like the wood chips left over from whittling). If something can be cut, it is secable or sectile. A sector and a segment are both things that are cut off from a greater whole. Secateurs are cutting implements. The full etymology of sickle is unclear, but it may well have arrived in the Germanic languages from the Latin. (Sect, on the other hand, is more likely to have evolved from Latin sequi, “to follow”.)

Latin tangere, “to touch”, appears in the Latin phrase noli me tangere, “do not touch me”, which has been adopted as a motto by many families, including the Tobins, St Aubins, Itersons and the Graemes of Perthshire, as well as by several military organizations.

It’s actually a Biblical phrase, the Latin rendering of New Testament Greek me mou haptou. These words were reputedly said by the reincarnated Jesus to Mary Magdalene, and a better translation would have been “do not cling to me”.

The extent to which noli me tangere influenced the Revolutionary American phrase “Don’t tread on me!” seems not to be particularly clear, although the two phrases are nowadays bandied about as if one were a direct translation of the other. But “don’t tread on me” would actually be noli me calcare, which is a phrase from St Augustine, not the Bible.

Perhaps the current confusion between “don’t tread on me” and noli me tangere was fostered by the flag of the Secessionist State of Alabama, which in 1861 adopted the coiled rattlesnake of the Gadsden flag (emerging appropriately from under a cotton bush), but substituted noli me tangere for “don’t tread on me”.

Tangere is the origin of tangible, referring to something you can touch. Things that touch or influence each other are contiguous or contingent, and a disease spread by bodily contact is contagious. Pertingency is the act of reaching out to touch something. Something that is integer is untouched, meaning whole or undamaged—hence the integers are the series of whole numbers.

From the past participle of tangere comes Latin tactus, “touch”. Tact was originally a word for the sense of touch before it took on its current meaning of “a sense of what is appropriate”. Tactile still refers to something relating to touch, while tactful refers to someone who has a sense of tact. And if something is intact it is untouched, and therefore whole. Finally, I can’t help but mention Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty again—a fifteenth-century Scottish writer, translator and maniacal word-coiner. For a sample of his deranged writing style, you can look at the long quotation at the bottom of my previous post on aegophony, which contains the word tacturiency—the erotic sensation of touch.

-aɪz

-ize: a suffix used to form verbs from adjectives and nouns

Ubiquitization: This is a strategy adopted by service firms in order to physically distribute their products and services ‘everywhere’.

Jones & Robinson, Operations Management (2012)

A variety of  specific E2 carrier protein and E3 enzyme pairs impart another important level of selectivity through their capacity to catalyze the ubiquitization of certain targeted proteins or classes of protein.

Stump & Nair in Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus, 14th Ed. (2007)

Ubiquitization. Now, there’s a word. It’s the sort of word that people object to, the sort of new coining with -ize that seems to set the teeth on edge. Interestingly, for a new word, it has already acquired two different meanings, illustrated above. Jones & Robinson are using it as you might expect, forming a verb from the adjective ubiquitous. But Stump & Nair have formed the same word from the noun ubiquitin, the name of a protein that is extremely widespread in eukaryotic cells, in which it appears to have many roles, including marking other proteins down for degradation when it binds to them, in a process variously called ubiquination, ubiquitylation or ubiquitization. (Me, I’d stick with ubiquination. Life’s too short for the other two.)

People have been objecting to -ize words for years—in the nineteenth century the recently popular words demoralize, deputize and jeopardize were taken to be signs that the English language was in terminal decline. (The American lexicographer Noah Webster, of whom more later, actually claimed to have coined the word demoralize in a pamphlet written around 1793. But in his Dictionary of the English Language of 1828 he dismissed jeopardize as being unneeded because there was already a perfectly good verb from jeopardy, namely to jeopard. Sadly, jeopard was already dead when he wrote those words—Samuel Johnson had been criticized in 1755 for including such an obsolete word in his own Dictionary.)

Perhaps there are still people around who dislike the word jeopardize. There are certainly  those who still condemn hospitalize as something ugly and new-fangled, even though it’s been in use for more than a century. Of other hated -ize words, prioritize has been around since the 1950s, and incentivize since the ’60s.

The other thing about -ize that seems to raise people’s ire is what I’m doing right now—using British English spelling, but with the -ize suffix instead of -ise. A surprising number of people seem to believe that -ize is an Americanism, and -ise is the correct British spelling.

However, -ize is what I was taught at school, and it’s the standard spelling used by that bastion of British English, the Oxford English Dictionary. British English speakers frequently encounter British English documents using -ize, but many must either fail to notice, assume an error has been made, or deduce that yet another creeping Americanism has crossed the Atlantic.

But British English was using -ize long before there was an America. for instance, the OED’s list of citations attests the spelling realize in 1611, whereas realise doesn’t appear until 1755, in a letter written by Samuel Johnson (I’ll come back to that).

Why are there two spellings? The suffix -ize comes from the Greek verb-forming suffix -izein and the Latin -izare. Words that came into English direct from the Classical languages therefore brought a z with them. But some words arrived with us more circuitously, via French. The French language doesn’t have much use for the letter z in the middle of a word, and so replaced it with an s. So Greek baptizein, Latin baptizare, became baptiser in French—“to baptize”. So if English imported a word from French, it came with -ise as the default ending. But there are several problems with using a mixture of -ize and -ise according to a word’s origin: 1) No-one could keep track of that; 2) Sometimes we can’t tell which route a word followed; 3) Sometimes a word arrived by both routes; 4) We’re still inventing -ize/-ise words, within English, and often from words that are not Latin, Greek or French—winterize, for example.

So it really comes down to nothing more than “house style”—publishers (and individual writers) get to choose whether they use -ize or -ise, albeit with certain limitations I’ll come to in a minute. There is no right or wrong, merely a matter of consistency.

Johnson (who, you’ll recall, wrote the OED’s first example of realise) seems to have been a fan of the -ise variant, but not consistently so. His dictionary has (for example) an entry for epitomise, but also for  gormandize. The latter, being derived from the French, would seem to be a good candidate for the -ise suffix, if you were that way inclined.

Noah Webster, though, came down firmly on the side of -ize, partly from etymology, but mainly for consistency and uniformity with pronunciation. His choice has made American English the only version of English in which -ize is required and -ise forbidden. He also established the American spelling -yze (as in analyze), which never occurs in British English (analyse).

But British English has always kept a foot in both camps. Back in 1926, Henry Fowler wrote:

Most English printers follow the French practice of changing -ize to -ise; but the OED of the Oxford University Press, the Encyclopaedia Britannica of the Cambridge University Press, The Times, & American usage, in all of which -ize is the accepted form, carry authority enough to outweigh superior numbers.

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

Since then, Oxford University Press and the OED have held the line, to the extent that the use of -ize is sometimes called “Oxford spelling”. However, the University of Oxford style guide (for staff writing on behalf of the University) recommends -ise. Cambridge University Press’s style guide for British English nowadays allows either -ise or -ize. The Times switched from -ize to -ise in 1992. And the Encyclopædia Britannica is now an American publication that speaks of aluminum, sulfur and defense, and so can’t be taken as an exemplar of British spelling any longer.

 So is -ize now vanishingly rare? Not at all. I did a search of the British National Corpus (100 million words of British English text from the 1990s) using Brigham Young University’s handy search tool. I took the ten most common -ize verbs in the Corpus, and checked the proportion of -ise and -ize forms. (Since you ask, they were realize, recognize, organize, emphasize, minimize, criticize, apologize, maximize, characterize and summarize.) Overall, the -ize ending was used 37% of the time. As a quick check on the extent to which the Corpus might be contaminated by (say) quotes from American English, I checked for the occurrence of aluminum, sulfur and pajamas, which were the chosen spelling less than 1% of the time.

So -ize is still in common enough use in British English that it’s something of a puzzle that so many Brits seem not to have noticed.

There are a couple of reasons you might want to use -ise, however. One was given to me by the editor of a new publishing house, who told me he was going with –ise “… because we don’t want people to think we’ve got it wrong.”

The other reason is that you don’t need to remember so many exceptions. There are about 30 common verbs in English, ending with the sound -aɪz, that must be spelled -ise (even in American English). That’s because, although they happen to have an -aɪz ending, it doesn’t come from Greek -izein, Latin -izare or French -iser. These verbs get their -ise spelling from some other etymological source.

One broad group has the -ise as part of a larger etymological unit. So we have:
Verbs ending in -cise (“cutting”):
circumcise, excise, incise
Verbs ending in -mise (“putting”):
demise, premise, surmise
Verbs ending in -prise (“taking”):
apprise, comprise, enterprise, prise (as in “prise open”), surprise
Verbs ending in -vise (“seeing”):
advise, improvise *, revise, supervise

Another group are those verbs that are derived from a noun which contains -ise:
compromise, disguise, enterprise, exercise, franchise (+ enfranchise & disenfranchise), merchandise, premise
(Verbs premise and enterprise appear in this list and the one above, because there is some doubt about their route of arrival in English.)

A couple are back-formations from nouns containing an s:
advertise (from advertisement), televise (from television)

Finally there are a few that don’t fall into the categories above:
arise, rise (Old English)
despise (Latin despicere, “to look down upon”)
devise (? late Latin *divisare, frequentative of dividere, “to divide”)
chastise (etymology unclear, but not Greek, Latin or French)

There are others: agrise (“to shudder with horror”, from Old English), emprise (“to undertake”, -prise suffix), hypocrise (back-formation from hypocrisy). Altogether, include rare and obsolete words, the list stretches beyond sixty.

So when you use the -ize ending, you have to bear all those in mind.

Whereas, if you go for -ise, you can forget all that detail. But just be sure to remember capsize. No-one knows its derivation, but it’s always spelled with -ize.

* You might wonder what improvise has to do with “seeing”. It comes from the prefix im-, meaning “not”, and Latin provisus, “foreseen”. You improvise in unforeseen circumstances.