New word of the day: Redact

Redact, redaction, redacted. It's what MPs have done to their expenses claim forms from the last four years, before they were made available online (here, if you care). Watching Newsnight just now, you would have thought that to redact means to censor, to obliterate embarrassing revelations with black ink. It doesn't. It means to prepare for publication, or, indeed, to edit. At least that's what my Penguin Concise English Dictionary says. Wikipedia goes a bit deeper: redaction is a form of editing in which multiple source texts are combined (redacted) and subjected to minor alteration to make them into a single work. Often this is a method of collecting a series of writings on a similar theme and creating a definitive and coherent work.

So there you have it. Redact. One cool word none of us knew this morning.