If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that we regularly encourage you to spend time looking up the history of words (their etymology), practicing how to spell and pronounce them correctly, and reading as much as you can of as many different types of text as you find to increase your exposure to the widest possible range of new vocabulary. As part of this process, we try our best to convince you that this is time well spent, because of the benefits an improved vocabulary will bring you in your career, your educational goals, and your self-esteem. In other words, we do a bit of proselytizing in hopes that you’ll become a devoted lover of the English language.

Today we’ll look at the word proselytize, and demonstrate the ways we talked about above to study this word. Though you may not have seen this word before, it’s been in the English language since at least the 17th century, and many writers have used it. Here’s a quote from author Aldous Huxley, best known for his novel Brave New World:

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

In the 15th century, a proselyte was someone who had converted from Christianity to Judaism; the word comes from a Greek root meaning “to come over.” The verb to proselytize later referred to the act of persuading someone to change their religious beliefs, or converting them to a different faith. We use the word for the same purpose these days, as well as in a more generic sense of trying to convert people to a particular point of view (religious or not) or to get them to support a particular cause.

It’s important to study both the spelling and pronunciation of this word – they’re a bit tricky. Proselytize is pronounced PRAW-sell-ih-tiez, and because of the i-sound of the y, you might be tempted to spell the word proselitize instead. Another point of confusion in pronunciation and meaning might come from the fact that it appears to start with the unrelated word prose (“written language that is not poetry”), which is pronounced PROZE, not PRAWZ.

Practice writing out this word several times to lock the correct spelling in your eyes, hand, and brain, then say it out loud using the correct pronunciation. To ensure that you remember the word’s meaning, write out one or two practice sentences. You can also search for the word being used in context in someone else’s writing (the internet is a very useful resource for this particular exercise).

If you weren’t convinced of the value of vocabulary study before now, we hope we’ve changed your mind!