contaminate

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English contaminaten,^[2][3][4] borrowed from Latin contāminātus,^[2][5][6][7] the past participle of contāminō (“to bring into contact, mingle; to defile”),^[8][5][6][9] perhaps with the influence of Old French contaminer.^[6] The Latin verb comes from contāmen (“contact, pollution”),^{[8][10][5][11]} for *contagmen,^[8][10][11] from com- (“with, together”) and the base of tangō (“to touch”),^{[8][5][11][9]} from Proto-Indo-European *tag- (“to touch, handle”).^[5][3] De Vaan instead starts from an uncompounded noun *tagmen (“contact”), the prefix being added only in the verb, and notes that the alternative *tagsmen, close to the forms in Barnhart and Klein, can't be proved.^[12][6][9] He reconstructs Proto-Indo-European *th₂g-men-.^[12]

Earliest recorded meaning

To infect with disease, and to defile: probably before 1425, in a Middle English translation of Chauliac's Grande Chirurgie, of bones and of the walls of a wound.^[2][6] The OED, in an entry not fully revised, has the adjective contaminate from before 1555, in Latimer, and the verb only from 1563, in Foxe.^[8]

Semantic evolution

De Vaan gives "to come into contact with" as the original Latin meaning, and already in Latin it had turned into "to pollute, spoil".^[12][5] English took only the bad sense, first in surgery,^[2][5] and by the 16th century more broadly for corrupting or sullying anything by contact or mixture.^[8] Johnson (1755) defined the verb as "to defile; to pollute; to corrupt by base mixture", quoting Shakespeare's "Contaminate our fingers with base bribes",^[13] and listed contaminate as an adjective too, also from Shakespeare; that use is now archaic or obsolete.^[13][14][7] In the 20th century the word gained specific uses, first quoted in 1926: for radioactivity, for poison gas and in textual criticism, for mixing readings from different lines of manuscripts.^[8][15] The noun contamination had meanwhile been applied to the blending of stories or plots (1877) and of word forms in philology (1888),^[8] and American Heritage records a matching use of the verb in linguistics.^[3]

Timeline

• probably before 1425 – to infect with disease; to defile.^[2][6]
• before 1555 – adjective, contaminated, defiled.^[8]
• 1563 – to make impure by contact or mixture, in Foxe, the OED's first quotation for the verb.^[8]
• 1926 – to expose to radioactivity.^[8]
• 1934 – the derivative contaminant, something that contaminates.^[5][6]

Meanings

Verb

1. To make something impure or unfit for use by contact or mixture; to pollute: Runoff from the mine contaminated the well.^[14][7][3]
2. To soil, corrupt or infect by contact or association.^[7][8]
3. To make radioactive, or expose to radioactivity.^[14][3][8]
4. (textual criticism) To mix readings from different lines of manuscripts.^[8][15]
5. (linguistics) To influence the form or meaning of a word or phrase by blending with another.^[3]

Adjective

1. (archaic) Contaminated, defiled.^[14][8][13]

Word family

• contaminative
• contaminator
• contaminable
• decontaminate
• recontaminate
• contaminant

Related words

• contamination
• contagion
• contact
• contingent
• tangent
• tangible
• tactile

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
3. ^ a b c d e f The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
4. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
5. ^ a b c d e f g h Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
6. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
7. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ a b c Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
10. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
11. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
12. ^ a b c de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
13. ^ a b c Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
14. ^ a b c d Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
15. ^ a b Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press