Word of the Day

: May 27, 2017

concatenate

verb kahn-KAT-uh-nayt

What It Means

: to link together in a series or chain

concatenate in Context

"While the stories are separate, they're concatenated in that characters recur from story to story, so while one might be a major player in one tale, he might be only alluded to in a subsequent narrative." — Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2013

"To test cockatoos' planning and mechanical capacities, Auersperg designed a box housing a visible cashew nut blocked by five interlocking devices. The locks were concatenated so that the bird would have to solve the lock puzzle farthest from the reward before gaining access to the next, and so on." — Jenny Jennings Foerst, American Scientist, November 2013

Did You Know?

Concatenate comes directly from Latin concatenare, which in turn is formed from con-, meaning "with" or "together," and catena, meaning "chain." (The word chain itself also evolved from catena.) Concatenate has a somewhat longer history as an adjective, meaning "linked together," than as a verb. The adjective first appeared in English in the 15th century and the verb wasn't in use until more than a century later. Catenate, a verb in its own right meaning "to link in a series," had also arrived on the scene by the early 17th century.