Excise

How to spell excise

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce excise

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does excise mean?

1. nounA government tax charged on certain goods produced or sold within a country, such as alcohol, tobacco or fuel.
2. verbTo remove something by cutting it out, whether surgically from tissue or editorially from a text.

Excise in a sentence

• noun

  The government raised the excise on tobacco again this year.

• verb

  The surgeon will excise the small growth next week.

• noun

  Excise duty on imported spirits adds significantly to the price.

• verb

  The editor asked her to excise the libellous paragraph before publication.

Where does excise come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This single spelling actually covers two words from different sources that happened to converge. The verb meaning 'to cut out' comes from Latin excidere, made of ex- meaning 'out' and caedere meaning 'to cut', and its past participle stem excis- gives us the modern form; the same caedere root sits inside 'incision', 'concise' and 'precise'. The noun meaning a tax or duty took a different road, arriving in the 1590s from Middle Dutch excijs (now accijns), a word for a levy that was probably reshaped under the influence of Latin accensare, 'to tax'. So the tax word is essentially Dutch while the surgical word is Latin, yet both ended up spelled identically in English. Because of that shared ending, the trap for writers is the soft -cise spelling rather than -size or -cize. The two senses are also stressed differently, the tax noun on the first syllable and the cutting verb on the second.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• cise (from Latin caedere, to cut)