Desalinizing

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The act of extracting salts and minerals from saline water to render it drinkable is essential for providing potable water sources
2. This method involves the purification of seawater through the removal of dissolved minerals, enabling safe human consumption
3. The process involves the removal of salt and other impurities from seawater, making it suitable for drinking and irrigation purposes

Etymology: Desalinizing is a modern technical coinage built from familiar parts: the prefix "de-", meaning "remove or reverse", the adjective "saline", from Latin "salinus" and ultimately "sal", "salt", and the verb-forming suffix "-ize". Taken together, it describes the act of taking salt out of something, most often seawater, which is the sense of the word that matters in practice. The suffix has a longer pedigree than the rest of the word. It passed from Ancient Greek through Late Latin and Middle French into Middle English as "-isen", and by the time English settled on "-ize" it had become one of the most productive ways of turning nouns and adjectives into verbs. "Saline" arrived in English earlier, through Latin, and has long been used of salty water and salt deposits. The word thus joins the older vocabulary of salt and water with a suffix that English has used for centuries to create new verbs, which is why it reads as plainly descriptive: its parts say exactly what the process does.