/ˈrætɪfaɪ/
[verb] To officially approve or confirm something, such as a law, agreement, or decision, so that it becomes valid and can take effect.
Every time a country signs a treaty, they echo a Roman legal word built from the idea of simply 'making something fixed.'
The word 'ratify' takes us back to classical Latin, where two ancient roots were joined together to express the idea of making something permanent and settled. The first root is 'ratus,' the past participle of the verb 'reri,' meaning 'to think, to calculate, or to consider something decided.' The second element is 'facere,' the Latin verb meaning 'to make' or 'to do.' Combined, they gave Roman lawyers 'ratificare,' meaning literally 'to make settled' or 'to fix as decided.' The journey into English therefore runs: Latin ratificare → Medieval Latin ratificare (used in legal and ecclesiastical documents) → Middle French ratifier → Middle English ratifien.
The root 'ratus' carried a sense of something that had been properly thought through and resolved — not a hasty decision, but a considered, binding one. This idea of deliberate mental settling is preserved in several other English words. The same root 'reri' gave Latin 'ratio,' meaning a reckoning or calculation, which passed through Old French as 'raison' before arriving in English as both 'reason' (via Anglo-Norman resoun) and 'ratio' (borrowed directly from Latin). So every time you talk about 'reason' or do a mathematical 'ratio,' you are touching the same ancient idea of careful, considered thinking.
The other half of the word, 'facere,' meaning 'to make,' is one of the most productive roots in all of English vocabulary. It gave us a remarkable family of words, each showing a different shade of 'making.' Latin facere → Old French faire → English 'fact' (something that was made or done), Latin satisfacere → Old French satisfaire → English 'satisfy,' and Latin benefacere → Old French bienfaire → English 'benefit.' The suffix '-ify' itself, which appears in dozens of English verbs, descends directly from this same Latin facere, filtered through Old French '-ifier.'
The word entered English in the 14th century, primarily through the administrative and diplomatic language of the medieval Church and the emerging nation-states of Europe. Popes and kings needed precise vocabulary for confirming councils, sealing treaties, and approving charters, and 'ratify' filled that role exactly. The Middle French form 'ratifier' was the most immediate source, as French was the dominant language of diplomacy, law, and educated writing in medieval England. By the time English scribes were using the word, it already carried its modern meaning almost perfectly intact.
What makes 'ratify' so interesting is how little it has changed. Unlike many borrowed words that wandered through dramatic shifts in meaning over the centuries, 'ratify' has remained loyal to its Roman origins. A Roman lawyer from the age of Cicero would have understood what a modern diplomat means when a parliament 'ratifies' an agreement. Today the word lives most comfortably in the language of international law and politics — constitutions are ratified, treaties are ratified, amendments are ratified — always carrying that original sense of an important, deliberate act of making something permanently fixed and officially real.