At my business most of the employees use the word inactivate frequently. Is this proper grammar? I've always used deactivate.
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Google Ngram Viewer is also a fun (not authoritative) reference on word frequency.– John McCarthySep 3, 2013 at 22:01
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6 Answers
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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4Inactivate is also common in technology. I believe it derives from the fact that "active" and "inactive" are two opposing states, which leads to "activating" and "inactivating".– LynnNov 18, 2011 at 3:41
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@Lynn, it's not common in my experience (as a computer / firmware / embedded software engineer). I don't think I've ever heard anyone use it in a non-life-sciences professional context.– cp.engrSep 19, 2016 at 20:39
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@cp.engr FWIW, as an application developer I do hear it frequently (e.g. when referring to account/billing states).– augurarFeb 24, 2017 at 1:34
According to OneLook, it is a word in 25 dictionaries:
http://www.onelook.com/?w=inactivate
- verb: make inactive
- verb: release from military service or remove from the active list of military service
answered Aug 12, 2010 at 22:46
The New Oxford American Dictionary reports just an example of sentence with inactivate.
inactivate ɪnˈæktəˌveɪt/
verb [transitive]
make inactive or inoperative: household bleach does not inactivate the virus | [as adjective] (inactivated) an inactivated polio vaccine.
Outside that context, I have never heard somebody using that verb.
answered Aug 13, 2010 at 2:03
Another word that is used with a similar meaning is de- activate. But "inactivate" is perfectly fine.
Dictionary.com says:
in·ac·ti·vate /inˈaktəˌvāt/
Verb: Make inactive or inoperative: inactivate the virus.
And according to Google deactivate has 8,180,000 results; inactivate has 17,600,000 results, implying it is even used more. Though there may be some specific domain in which it is used a lot on the Internet (scientific papers? military?).
answered Aug 12, 2010 at 23:50
When I was in the military way back in the seventies, we frequently used "active" and "inactive", and we used the very "activate" but never "inactivate". Contemporary usage seems to derive chiefly from the computer industry ('inactivate' and 'inactivated' are frequently used in programming commentary.
