Examinate

Part of speech: verb, adjective

Definitions

1. Archaic term meaning to look into something closely, inspecting or investigating it in order to learn its nature
2. An obsolete verb for carefully inspecting or questioning something so as to discover the truth about it
3. Old-fashioned word for scrutinizing or probing a matter thoroughly, with the aim of establishing the facts

Etymology: "Examinate" is a rare English word, and its history runs through a common ancestor. It comes from Latin "exāminātus," the past participle of "exāminō," which means "to weigh" or "to test," and English "examine" descends from that same Latin verb. The "-ate" ending is a Latin-style suffix that English uses to form adjectives and verbs, so the word looks like "examine" with a suffix attached. The twist is that "examinate" was not built directly from "examine" in the usual way. It is a back-formation from "examination," meaning a speaker or writer took the noun "examination" and worked backward to create a verb, reshaping it into a form that looked like the Latin participle. Back-formations like this happen when people reverse-engineer a shorter base from a longer word, and "examinate" is one of several English verbs that arose this way.

Synonyms: examine, inspect, scrutinize