Concatenate

[Dr. Goodword]

• concatenate •

Pronunciation: kên-kæt-ên-ayt • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Verb, transitive

Meaning: To connect together to form a chain or series.

Notes: Today's Good Word is connected to the image of a chain, a line of items, each connected to what precedes and succeeds it. This word comes with a panoply of the usual derivations from Latinate verbs. A person who concatenates is a concatenator. The noun is concatenation. This may refer to a concatenative (the adjective) process or the result, as 'a concatenation of rail cars'.

In Play: Any string of things related to each other qualifies as a concatenation: "The elephants concatenated themselves into a train by each of them holding the tail of the one before it with its trunk." However loosely, any connected string of related objects makes up a concatenation: "Farley's presentation was less an argument for reducing everyone's salary except the president's than a series of loosely concatenated bits of data leading away from his intended conclusion."

Word History: Today's Good Word is based on the past participle, concatenatus, of the Latin verb concatenare "to link together", comprising con- "(together) with" + catena "chain". Catena is also the source of French chaîne, Spanish cadena and Italian catena. Catena was inherited from the PIE root kat- "to weave together; chain, net", source also of Latin cassis "hunting net, snare" and caterva "crowd, throng". We find evidence of this word in Slavic languages like Russian kota "fish trap", Bulgarian kotora "stall, pen, sty", Serbian kotar "district", and Slovenian kotár "district".

[call_copse]

A word most commonly used in programming, it's a useful word for a function along with join and append. The & symbol often represents concatenation.

[gwray]

I have heard catenate and concatenate used interchangeably. Is there a difference between them.

I first met catenate as an operation that linked separate pieces of text into a single entity such as
message = "your search has yielded " & text(count) & " results"

In the above example, '&' would be referred to as a catenation operator.

[call_copse]

I've only heard of catenate used alone with respect to chemistry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenation

It does have the meaning of chain or join, but for some reason in my computer science experience only concatenate is used - I don't know of any languages using the non con- version. I certainly don't know every language to be fair!

[gwray]

Unix has the cat command, which chains files together. Wikipedia claims that the name is derived from its function to concatenate files but I wonder if it derives from catenate instead.

When two words have similar meanings, often they have some connotation that distinguishes them. Is that the case here?

At other times, a longer word is used in favour of a shorter word because it seems weightier. Examples are orientate vs. orient and epicenter vs. centre as in "Justin Bieber is at the epicenter of media scrutiny". Is that why concatenate is favoured?

[David Myer]

Further examples might include overwhelm which really means whelm. I expect I will wake in the night with more.

[Slava]

In defense of epicenter, at least in regards to earthquakes, the epi- is important. When we speak of the epicenter, it is as a site on the surface. This is not the actual center of the earthquake, as the quake is deep underground. It is a place near or above it, epi-, in other words.

[Philip Hudson]

What if one lined up some cats in a row. Would that be a concatenation of cats!

[bbeeton]

Absent from this discussion is "catenary", the shape of a chain or cable suspended from two points and allowed to hang free without any extra load. This would have been the shape of the cables between the towers of the Brooklyn or Golden Gate Bridge (and other suspension bridges of this type) before the roadway was attached. Pretty!

(I've been accused, by an engineer, of thinking of bridges as works of art as opposed to engineering marvels. Actually, they're both, or should be.)