Saltifying

Part of speech: verb, adjective

Definitions

1. Adding salt to something so that it becomes salty or is preserved in brine
2. Turning a substance or surface into one containing salt, often by soaking or mixing it with salty material
3. Making food, soil or water salty, either by mixing in salt or by allowing salt to build up in it

Etymology: Salting food is one of the oldest preservation methods, and "saltifying" is a plain English formation with no folk story behind it. It is built from "salt," which comes from Old English "sealt," shared with Germanic relatives and ultimately traceable to an Indo-European root meaning something like "to be salty." To this base English adds the Latin-derived suffix "-fy," itself taken from French "-fier" and Latin "-ficare," meaning "to make" or "to cause to become." Put together, the word means "to make salty" or "to add salt to." The pattern is productive: English speakers have long built verbs in "-fy" from nouns and adjectives, as with "beautify," "simplify," and "purify." "Saltify" follows the same model, and its use is largely technical or chemical, where it can describe the process of forming salts. The sense of applying salt to something, such as to food or a road, is its most straightforward reading.