Differentiate - *legitimated* vs *legitimized*
Please analyse and differentiate the two sets of participles
- legitimated / legitimating
- legitimized / legitimizing
What are their overlaps, and what are exclusive to each.
According to the Grammarist they are synonyms; legitimize is less formal and legitimate is also an adjective while legitimize is only a verb:
Legitimate is an adjective describing something or someone being genuine or of real value, permitted by a set of rules or laws. In one case, it is used to describe a child as being born of parents who were married, though this use is a little out-dated.
This can also be a verb, legitimated or legitimating, and it means the action of making something or someone legitimate according to the definition above. It has two noun forms, legitimation and legitimator.
Legitimize is simply another verb form of legitimate, a more popular and accepted form. It has two noun forms, legitimization and legitimizer.
Grammarphobia has a brief history about its development and usage:
The verb “legitimate” (to make legitimate) is indeed becoming scarce in common usage, but there’s a good reason.
The verb and the adjective “legitimate” are easy to tell apart in speech because the last syllable is pronounced differently (MATE for the verb, MUT for the adjective). But in writing, the two are identical and can be told apart only from the context.
In our opinion, the development of “legitimize” was inevitable, and we see no reason to avoid it. While many people complain about new words ending with “ize,” there’s nothing unusual about this verb-forming suffix.
From the evidence offered by Ngram, legitimize is equally used both in AmE and BrE, but is considerably less common than legitimate.