Restitute
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If you're in museum administration, you will certainly know the meaning of "restitution". But what do you do with a headline like this?
"Ethiopian Heritage Authority Intensifies Push to Restitute Looted Artifacts." ENA English.
Ted McClure asks:
Back-formation from "restitution"? Or verb origin of "restitution"? I would have thought the verb form was "restore".
I leave it to Language Log readers to adjudicate.
Selected readings
- "'Grammar vigilantes' brought to justice" (8/22/08) — "ordered to pay restitution")
- "The snoot and the Geechee" (6/13/11) — back-formation
Philip Taylor said,
August 29, 2025 @ 8:04 am
"Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking" — oops, sorry, "Unqualified as I am to adjudicate on such matters", I defer to the OED :
Allen W. Thrasher said,
August 29, 2025 @ 9:18 am
Why not just say “give back”?
rpsms said,
August 29, 2025 @ 9:37 am
I see very many of these strange or archaic examples lately. I feel reasonably sure this phenomenon is AI driven: verbose but without a human-style choice pattern.
Bob Ladd said,
August 29, 2025 @ 9:42 am
Thanks to Philip Taylor for deferring to the OED. I would certainly have guessed it was a back-formation, but clearly, if it is one, it has a long pedigree.
Following Philip's example, I deferred to Google n-grams. Restitute is indeed very rare, but it does occur throughout their corpus, with a conspicuous spike right after WW2. There's also a slight upward trend since about 1980, which is parallelled in the much more common restitution.
Bob Ladd said,
August 29, 2025 @ 9:49 am
@rpsms: Your comment appeared while I was writing mine. The post-WW2 spike obviously can't have been driven by AI, but rather by the flurry of relevant legal decisions after the war. This suggests that the word has always been there for use in verbose style when the meaning is called for. That may also explain the recent upward trend (involving museums and colonialism).
You may well be right that AI is responsible for reviving some low-frequency words, but in this case I think it would be hard to tell.
Bruce Rusk said,
August 29, 2025 @ 10:03 am
It may also matter that restituer is a good, solid French word, hence likely to appear in legalese and/or translations.
Eric said,
August 29, 2025 @ 11:43 am
I'm much more accustom to seeing the term "repatriate" used in this context.
mkvf said,
August 29, 2025 @ 1:00 pm
If I read a headline that artifacts were to be restored, I'd be quite likely to think that meant "to an earlier condition, before they were damaged by looting", not necessarily "to the place they were looted from".
I suspect "give back" is avoided as it more frankly conveys that they were stolen.
HS said,
August 29, 2025 @ 7:03 pm
Surely the problem with the headline, even if you accept that there is a verb "to restitute" meaning "to restore, to return, to give back", is with who is doing the restoring, i.e. who the agent it. The Ethiopian Heritage Authority is not pushing to restitute (i.e. return) anything; it's pushing to have them restituted (i.e. returned) to Ethiopia by whoever currently possesses them.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 30, 2025 @ 10:44 am
In the lawyer-jargon variety of American English, "restitution" is a pretty common noun, certainly not limited to the international art trade context, and having both technical and non-technical meanings. But the verb "restitute" is vanishingly rare and I certainly can't recall ever having seen it myself. I just searched an archive of U.S. Supreme Court decisions: "restitutes," "restituting," and "restituted" are all unknown and "restitute" occurs exactly once. Significantly, it does not even appear in an actual opinion authored by an actual Justice but rather in the official summary of the decision (I think sometimes called the syllabus?) prepared by staff. (Specifically in the summary of the opinion of Justice Breyer in United States v. Booker, decided in early 2005.) The relevant phrase (as part of a summary of what judges are required to consider in imposing sentences on convicted criminals) is "the need to avoid unwarranted sentencing disparities and to restitute victims."
I then searched a set of decisions of the New York state courts and found three instances of "restitute," of which two were from within the last year or so. All in trial-level decisions (i.e. not appellate decisions meant to serve as precedent in future cases), and all in the specific context of disputes about artworks allegedly looted or stolen by the Nazis. So that suggests that the international-art-world usage has occasionally been picked up by judges in that specific context, without those judges necessarily thinking that "restitute" could be swapped in for "make restitution" in other contexts. The earliest use was from back in 1966, in a case involving conflicting claims to ownership of a Chagall painting that had been confiscated by the Nazis in occupied Belgium after the Jewish owners had left it behind when they fled. The judge judge there was quoting a 1949 letter by the Acting Legal Advisor of the U.S. State Department, which said that it was the U.S. Government's "policy to undo the forced transfers and restitute identifiable property to the victims of Nazi persecution wrongfully deprived of such property." So the use in that context is quite old which makes it interesting to me that it has made so little progress in spreading.
/df said,
September 7, 2025 @ 3:08 pm
We have restitution, constitution, institution, destitution. Then constitute and institute are verbs but destitute is an adjective. Who can guess how restitute (which btw is unknown to the spell-checker in my browser) will turn out? It's stuff like this that gives me fleeting pangs of sympathy for EFL students (but of course the pain is worthwhile).
chris said,
September 10, 2025 @ 3:39 pm
If you restitute an artifact, are you giving back the actual artifact, or are you paying someone compensation for the loss (some would be so uncouth as to say theft) of the artifact? Restitution in other contexts is usually monetary (partly because the "other contexts" are mainly civil lawsuits).