verbs - Is "inactivate" really a word?


At my business most of the employees use the word inactivate frequently. Is this proper grammar? I've always used deactivate.



Answer



There are 88 examples of inactivate in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and 102 for deactivate, showing they occur with about equal frequency. Most of the examples for inactivate, though, are used in a biological context, talking about inactivating viruses, genes, and “potent mutagenic compounds”, for example. So inactivate appears to be a term of art in the science of biology.


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