Concatenate vs. Catenate

Solution 1:

I'm a programmer and concatenate would definitely be the standard and most natural-sounding term. But judging by the definitions of the terms, this seems to just be a matter of convention.

You could argue that all chains chain something together and thus concatenate is etymologically redundant, but concatenate has won out in modern English. Note that there are a few million Google hits for concatenate and less than a tenth of that for catenate.

Solution 2:

Based on @LorinHochstein's comment to @LukeBradford's answer

Let's break down concatenate

• con means "with" but with what?
• catenate. Oh okay so we are adding something to self (or this for the OOP programmers out there)

Catenate

We are adding pieces together, any pieces will do.

Con-Catenate

We are adding pieces together and since our current text (this) is the originator of the request it must become our root text so that other pieces will be added to this