Surprise! It’s “comprise”

November 22nd, 2008 at 07:00am Barry Wood

Occasionally there’s method in my madness. In my previous offering, I used “A cohort comprised 300 to 600 soldiers.” Now I want to talk about “comprise.”

It means “contain,” “embrace,” “include.” It should always be used in the active voice. In other words, it should never be “is comprised of.”

With “comprise,” the sum comes first, then the parts.

As expressed simply by John B. Bremner in “Words on Words”:

“The whole comprises the parts.” For alternative verbs, “The parts compose (constitute, make up) the whole.”

Despite this fairly simple concept, “comprise” is one of the most frequently misused words in English. In fact, we had an editor here at the newspaper who finally banned its use because we kept getting it wrong. That’s certainly one way to do it.

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