The suffix -ize, which comes from the Greek verb suffix -izein, has become very important in English as a means of turning nouns and adjectives into verbs. Formalize, jeopardize, legalize, and modernize are examples of words that were coined in English hundreds of years ago. Other words that were coined later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as emphasize, hospitalize, industrialize, and computerize, are now also well established. Words ending in -ize often have related nouns ending in -ization: dramatize/dramatization.
