I always buy ‘pasteurized’ milk, even when I am in Nepal where many people buy raw milk from the farms and I have to travel a long distant to find a gallon of pasteurized milk.

I cannot remember exactly what grade I was studying at, whether it was fourth or fifth when I heard the word ‘pasteurization’.  In Nepali it is borrowed from the western world.  

Even though the world ‘pasteurized’ is widely used in English language, I believe, many people do not know the origin of this common word. I was looking for a word that would be very unique but common. I am very excited when I find the word which is one of the very first English words that I was introduced with in my life.

Pasteurization is the process of boiling liquid food up to a certain high temperature for a specific length of time so as to kill and minimize the growth of harmful microorganisms.  The process was first discovered by the French Scientist Louis Pasteur around mid 19^th century.  So the origin of the English word ‘pasteurized’ is the last name of a French chemist and microbiologist.

Now let’s look at the formation process of the word ‘pasteurized’. First, the word ‘pasteurization’ came after somebody’s name from the coinage process, which is also known as eponyms (meaning coinage of a word from a name of person or after the name of a place. Next the word goes under the process of Backformation where the noun pasteurization is reduced to a verb pasteurize. Finally, ‘pasteurize’ becomes adjective ‘pasteurized’ by taking suffix ‘ed’ at the end of the verb.

Friends! Buy only pasteurized milk because it has far less microbial than the raw milk.