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meaning - What is the difference between "filtrated" and "filtered"?


The word "filtered" seems to be much more common than "filtrated". I know that these words derive from "to filter" and "to filtrate". What is the difference in meaning between these two verbs?


The context I have in mind is a mathematical one. Here the words "filtration" and "filter" have fixed and different meanings.


In addition, there is an invariant for certain objects which are endowed with a filtration (technically this isn't accurate but let's suppose so). This invariant is called "filtrated K-theory" by several people. Yet, some people insist that it should be called "filtered K-theory" because filtrated is hardly a word or at least sounds weird and artificial. Can native speakers confirm this, or would you go for the more logical(?) "filtrated"?



Answer



The meanings of jargon terms often have essentially nothing to do with the meanings of the English words they're made from. Nowhere is this more the case than in mathematics.


I would use whichever term seems better established—regardless of whether it sounds artificial to native English speakers who aren't mathematicians—so as to give the reader the best possible chance to figure out what I'm talking about.


Updated: I should just answer your question. To my ear, there is a verb filter, and a count noun filter. There is also a non-count noun filtration. (You can count coffee filters, but the filtration of water through coffee grounds isn't something you can count.) So already the mathematical use of filtration as a count noun ("a filtration") differs from the everyday use.


I am pretty sure I never heard the verb filtrate used in everyday English until I started searching for such uses just now. A Google search for filtrated hits mainly dictionary sites. At the moment, the first non-dictionary hit is a link to this question! I can confirm that to my ear, it's hardly a word, and it sounds weird and artificial. Filtered sounds much nicer to me. It is an actual common, everyday word (and, correspondingly, gets hundreds of times as many Google hits).


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