Prioritize

How to spell prioritize

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce prioritize

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does prioritize mean?

1. verbTo arrange tasks or items in order of importance, or to treat something as more important than other things.

Prioritize in a sentence

• Managers must prioritize the most urgent repairs before the budget runs out.

• To prioritize family time, she now leaves the office by five each day.

Where does prioritize come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern verb built on the much older noun 'priority', which English took from the Medieval Latin prioritas, meaning the state of being first or earlier. That noun rests on the Latin adjective prior, which literally meant 'former', 'earlier', or 'in front', the comparative of an old root pri meaning 'before'. The same prior gives us the church title 'prior', the head who ranks before the rest of a monastery, and it lurks in 'premier' and 'primary' too. The verb 'prioritize' itself is a twentieth-century coinage, assembled by bolting the productive -ize ending onto 'priority' to mean 'to rank things by importance'; it spread through business and bureaucratic English from roughly the 1950s and 1960s. The spelling trap sits at the join: writers often forget the second 'i' (the one in 'prior-IT-ize') because the unstressed middle vowel is easy to swallow when speaking.

How the word is built

• prior- (from Latin prior: earlier, former)
• -ity (noun-forming, giving 'priority')
• -ize (verb-forming suffix: to make or treat as)

British and American spelling

Prioritize is the American spelling. British English spells it prioritise.