euthanise and euthanise

The discussion was triggered by the unfortunate death of a horse in the Melbourne Cup produced instances of both these forms.  I have to admit that euthanase is more familiar to me but that is a sign of my age. It seems that euthanase is an Australianism.  Everyone else in the world uses the form euthanise.

 Euthanasia is a Greek word borrowed into English. It derives from the prefix eu- meaning ‘good’ and thanatos meaning ‘death’.  The original meaning of euthanasia was ‘a good death’.  Euthanase is a backformation from euthanasia. The gatekeepers of the English language have always had it in for backformations for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Some have been very useful and have achieved high frequency and ultimately respectability.  For example, scavenger is the root word from which the verb to scavenge was derived.  Perhaps it is because it looks as if scavenge is the root and scavenger is the derived form. Making the agentive noun from the base verb is the usual procedure in English.  So euthanase is a fake base form.

 The other path taken with euthanise also has its problems.  The –ise ending is regular but the stem of euthanasia would be euthanas-.  If you went back to Greek it would be euthanat-.  The form euthanatize did appear briefly in the 1870s but did not seem to win popularity.   We prefer the short form.

 Australians seem to be shying away from euthanase and joining the rest of world in using euthanise.  Similarly euthanize is showing a decline in use, although the Oxford English Dictionary is sticking to its guns and listing only the –ize form which, they maintain, is the ending to use for any word that English has borrowed from Greek.  The Greek verb ending is –izein.

P.S. One reader thinks that euthanase makes better sense and is more elegant than euthanise. That reader has now been joined by a couple of others.