Identify

How to spell identify

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce identify

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does identify mean?

1. verbTo recognise, name, or establish exactly who someone is or what something is.

Identify in a sentence

• The witness could not identify the man in the photograph.

• A quick blood test can identify the underlying infection.

Where does identify come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin idem, meaning simply 'the same', from which medieval Latin built identitas, 'sameness' or the quality of being one and the same thing. The verb form arrived through the French identifier in the seventeenth century, carrying the idea of treating two things as one and the same, or of establishing precisely what something is. Early uses leaned on this sense of equating one thing with another, and only later did the more familiar modern meaning, 'to recognise or name a person or thing', settle into everyday English. The same Latin root sits behind 'identity', 'identical' and 'identikit', which is a useful memory anchor: keep the whole 'ident' block intact and add '-ify' to it. Because that long unstressed middle, the 'ti' between 'iden' and 'fy', is easy to slur in speech, the spelling rewards remembering the parent word 'identity' rather than the sound.

How the word is built

• ident- (from Latin idem: the same)
• -ify (verb suffix: to make or do)