Prioritising

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The process of organizing activities by their level of importance or urgency
2. The practice of evaluating tasks to decide which one's completion is most critical
3. The act of determining the relative importance of tasks to decide which should be addressed first

Etymology: "Prioritising" is the present participle and gerund of "prioritise", which is built from "priority" and the suffix "-ise". The verb is a fairly simple formation, but the suffix has a long lineage. It traces back through Middle French "-iser" and Late Latin "-izare" to the Ancient Greek "-ízein", which turned nouns and adjectives into verbs meaning "to make into" or "to treat in the manner of" something. English took the suffix in through Middle English "-isen" and has used it ever since to create verbs such as "legalise" and "modernise". The base word "priority" comes from the Latin "prior", meaning "earlier" or "former", the comparative of "primus", "first". Its earliest English sense was simply the state of being earlier or going before, and the idea of ranking things by importance grew out of that notion of coming first. So "prioritise" literally means to make something come first, arranging several things so that one of them precedes the others.

Synonyms: ranking, ordering, valuing, grading, classifying

Antonyms: neglecting, disregarding, overlooking, ignoring, postponing