Re: catenate vs concatenate (was: strncpy clarify result may not be null terminated)

Zack Weinberg
2023-11-27T14:40:48Z

[all attribution deleted because it was so tangled I couldn't make
sense of it]

>> Rather than "catenation", in my experience "concatenation" is the
>> common term
...
> We began fighting this pomposity before v7. There has only been
> backsliding since. "Catenate" is crisper, means the same thing,

[English pedant mode on]

"Concatenate" is the correct term; "catenate" means something completely
different, probably "hang between two posts like a chain". You can't
chop prefixes off a Latinate word and have it still mean the same thing.

[English pedant mode off]

Also, and much more importantly, "concatenate" is used at least 100x
more often than "catenate" in modern English, and that means it's the
word that a randomly selected reader of the manpages is more likely to
know, and, therefore, the word that the manpages should be using.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=concatenate%2Ccatenate&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

zw