coronate

You may have heard that the new king was coronated in Westminster Abbey. Not crowned but coronated.

The dictionaries have no problem with coronate as an adjective (from Latin corona crown, coronatus crowned), often used in botany and zoology to mean ‘crested’. Its use as a verb to coronate with a past participle coronated is much less common.  It dates back to 1623, which makes it pretty old, but the interesting thing is that the OED has no citations for it after 1847.  Google Ngram shows a spike in use for the coronation of George IV in 1821.  Then there is a smaller spike for the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838. For some reason there was an even smaller one in the early 1880s and then nothing until now.

Obviously we have not needed this word for some time.  It is perhaps being trotted out because coronating someone sounds more impressive than merely crowning them.  The Australian Writers’ Centre does not approve because coronate as a verb is a backformation from coronation and, as I have said before, the gatekeepers of our language have a down on backformations.  I don’t think there is any logical reason for this.  The argument is that usually there is an existing word that the backformation is doubling up on for no benefit. Sometimes this is true, but English doesn’t have an accountant at its heart, pruning excess and duplication.  Sometimes the backformation is useful and means something more than the original base word, as is the case with commentate which does not have the same meaning as comment.

So if you want to coronate King Charles III, I say go for it!