Polygamize

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To cause a person to have several spouses at the same time ; to bring a community or society into a system where plural marriage is practiced
2. To force or persuade someone into taking more than one husband or wife simultaneously ; to establish the custom of multiple concurrent marriages within a group
3. To induce a person to marry several partners at once ; to introduce or institutionalize the practice of having many simultaneous spouses in a population

Etymology: "Polygamize" is a plain English formation: "polygamy" with the verb-forming suffix "-ize" attached, meaning to make something polygamous or to practise or introduce polygamy. The "-ize" ending carries a long lineage of its own. It descends from the Ancient Greek suffix "-izein", which turned nouns and adjectives into verbs, and it passed into Late Latin as "-izare" and then through Old French, where it took the form "-iser", before arriving in Middle English as "-isen". English later settled on the spelling "-ize", a suffix now used to build verbs on a wide range of bases. The base, "polygamy", comes from Greek roots meaning "many" and "marriage", so the verb is built from two Greek elements that were combined in English and then given an English-facing verb ending. Because the suffix has been productive for centuries, English speakers can attach it to almost any noun, which is why "polygamize" is easy to understand even without a dictionary entry explaining it.