incentivize

Lots of people don't like the verb incentivize, including me, but the difference is that I don't like it for purely aesthetic purposes, not because I see anything wrong with it. Here's what I've just read about this verb in Michael Quinion's excellent Web page: IncentivisePeter McMenamin was one of several who commented on this word. “I too cringe along with Columbine at hearing incent and incentivize but motivate is too broad. One can motivate with threats, calls to patriotism, shame, and any number of other ways that do not involve financial incentives. I have been an economist for 40 years, but I have yet to encounter a felicitous single word meaning to motivate through financial incentives.”

And this is what my Merriam Webster's Concise Dictionary of English usage says about it: Incentivize, incent. These two recent coinages (incentivizes dates from 1970 in our files; incent from the 1990s) have little or no use outside of business contexts. More than half of our evidence comes from quoted speech, which suggests that neither is much used in writing. Predicatly they have been condemned by commentaros including Harper 1985 (against incentivize) and Garner 1998 (against both). A couple of examples of the words in action:

Stock options are a winning invention by management to incentivize people who are most deserving of being incentivized - namely management - Alan Abelson, Barron's, 26 May 1997

We like people who are vested through their ownership in the business, and are incented accordingly - O. Mason Hawkins, quoted by Sandra Ward, Barron's, 3 Feb. 1997

Our evidence so far does not show these verbs working their way into mainstream English.

Here's why I don't particularly like incentivize: 1. -ize (or also -ise in British spelling) is a suffix traditionally appended to Greek roots (in Greek izein) and the word incentive comes from Late Latin incentivum, producing thus a hybrid (which, by the way, is no big problem, suffice to look at television and slews of other words); 2. Portuguese and Spanish have incentivar and Italian incentivare. Both these verbs are formed from incentivo + are. If the same process had been applied to Latin (or at least Late Latin), we'd have had incentivare, which would have given rise to French incentiver, which in turn would have devolved into English incentivate, which has 56,800 occurrences on Google (but no space in "serious" dictionaries I've consulted), but who knows whether the people who used this verb weren't native speakers of Portuguese, Spanish or Italian (as I've said before, I don't trust Google entirely). Nonetheless, there's one site that sticks out, Urban Dictionary, done by people writing their own definitions of words, not very different from the Wikipedia concept, which gives a somewhat convincing definition for incentivate.

In short, I think in most situations it's perfectly acceptable to use motivate or drive or make or cause or any other verb in English, but incentivize seems to highlight the element of financial incentives referred to above.