Learn English – Does the verb ‘Christianize’ require the capital ‘C’? Why

verbs

I have never come across any verb that takes its first letter in capital. It generally happens in nouns. I have read many books and in our schools also, the rules of making letter capitals is quite clear and understood. I have never come across any book that defines capitalization of a verb. Nevertheless, here is the verb that is in capital!

Christianize (v) – two meanings there.

I completely understand the meaning but why the verb has taken a capital letter? Is this the special and only case?

Is there any rule for a verb to have its first letter capital?

Additional but useful note: When Google has become immensely popular and the verb has formed from its noun, mind it, we changed 'G' to a small letter. You don't Google something, you google it.

Best Answer

You may think that if the root word Christian is capitalized then Christianize must be capitalized too. However, capitalization is a matter of usage and it tends to change over time.

Style guides have disagreeing opinions.

From the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual 3.33 Religious Terms:

Words denoting the Deity except who, whose, and whom; names for the Bible and other sacred writings and their parts; names of confessions of faith and of religious bodies and their adherents ... are all capitalized.

Christian; also Christendom; Christianity; Christianize

On the other hand:

From the Chicago Manual of Style

But do not capitalize verbs derived from proper names:

to boycott, to fletcherize, to christianize, to pasteurize.

The question is: who's winning?

Google NGram Viewer which shows the capitalized version has consistently been more common since about 1840

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