crim

The root crim traces back to Latin crīmen — but to understand what crīmen really means, you have to go one step further back, to the verb cernere, 'to sift, to separate, to distinguish, to decide.' Picture a Roman farmer shaking grain through a sieve: the good seed falls through, the chaff stays behind. That act of sifting — separating one thing from another and passing judgment on it — is the seed of this entire word family.

From cernere came crīmen, originally 'a decision, a verdict' — the result of the sifting. But the word quickly narrowed: the thing most often sifted out and pointed at in a Roman court was the accusation, the charge brought against someone. So crīmen came to mean 'the charge,' and from there 'the offense being charged' — what we now call a crime. The logic is tight: a crime is literally 'the thing that got sifted out and accused.'

Through this single root, English built two families that look unrelated but share the same DNA:

- crīmen (the charge) → crime, criminal, criminality, criminology — everything about wrongdoing and the law.
- in- (onto) + crīmen → incriminate: to load a charge onto someone, to make them look guilty.
- dis- (apart) + crīmen → discriminate: to sift things apart — to tell them apart. Here the original 'sifting' sense survives almost intact.

Discriminate is the key that unlocks the family. At its core it simply means 'to distinguish, to judge differences' — a discriminating palate notices subtle flavors. But in the 20th century it acquired a dark second life: to 'sift people apart' on the basis of race, sex, or age, and treat them unequally. That's how one Latin verb for 'sifting grain' ended up covering both the courtroom (crime) and the fine art of telling things apart (discrimination). The thread is always the same: separate, judge, decide.