Make Your Point > Archived Issues > ASSAY
Send Make Your Point issues straight to your inbox.
The word assay, meaning "to test, or to analyze a substance," comes from the Latin exigere, "to test, to try out, to force, or to drive out." That means assay is cousins with other words that have to do with testing things out, or forcing them to happen or to move, like exact, examine, essay, exig___cy ("a situation that needs urgent action"), and exig___s ("too small, too few, or not enough, as if most of it has been driven out").
"Assay" traces back to the Late Latin word exagium, meaning "a weight, or the act of weighing," and further back to exigere, meaning "to measure, to test, or to try." In English, we first used "assay" to mean "to test the strength or excellence of," as in "They assayed their armor."
Part of speech:
When you want to make some test, challenge, or analysis sound scientifically precise, instead of calling it a "test" or a "challenge" or an "analysis," call it an "assay:" "The book is an assay of the president's first term."
"The results of globalisation – the nature of immigration, the fluidity of capital – have jolted countries' long-held beliefs of what they are, and confused the idea of what a nation state is meant to be. Like teenagers entering a new school, regions and countries – from Lipetsk to the US – feel compelled to assay their identity, change it up, build it out."
Explain the meaning of "assay" without saying "evaluate" or "analyze."
Fill in the blanks: "(Someone) assays (certain things): (looking closely at them or evaluating them in some way)."
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
1.
The opposite of ASSAYED could be
|