orthography - Is "denormalized" a word?


I use it all the time since I work with databases, but every time I write it somewhere with spell check I get the squiggly line below it. I've seen other people spell it with an "s" instead of a "z" but neither have an entry in the Merriam Webster dictionary.



Is this just technical jargon or am I misspelling it?



Answer



The -s vs. -z is a British vs. American spelling convention. Anything with the suffix -ize is spelled -ise by people following British conventions.


As for whether or not it's a word, I believe its meaning is transparent from its productive morphology:



  • normal

  • normal + ize = to make normal

  • de + normalize = to undo the normalization


So, using "de-" usually has a meaning that some previous normalization process is being undone. But I think it might still be acceptable if there was no explicit normalization process, but what you've done is take an intrinsically normal object and removed its normal property.


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