• chastise •
Pronunciation: chæs-taiz • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb
Meaning: 1. To castigate, rebuke, severely censure. 2. To punish, to inflict a penalty for an offense. 3. (Archaic) To purify.
Notes: The noun for today's adjective is chastisement. Chastise comes with two adjectives, chastised and chastisable, both of which may be negated by adding the prefix un-. Someone who chastises in either current sense may be called a chastiser.
In Play: We hear this word used in its first sense today in expressions like this: "His parents chastised Billy in no uncertain terms for putting a frog down his sister's dress." The second sense is always available, though: "They then chastised him by grounding him for a weekend."
Word History: Today's Good Word is an excellent example of English's gluttony for words from Romance languages. It borrowed castigate from the grandmother of them all, Latin, castigatus, the past participle of castigare "to correct, purify". Then it borrowed the Old French version of the same word, chastier "to warn, admonish, chastise". The Latin original comprises castus "pure" + agere "to move, drive, activate". Castus seems to have come from PIE kas-to-, a variant of kes- "to cut, prune", source also of Sanskrit sastra "knife", Greek keazein "to split", Latin caro "flesh, meat" and carere "to cut from", and Polish, Russian and Serbian kosa "scythe". Latin castus became Old French chaste "morally pure", to which English also helped itself.
