Most of J. Redding Ware's Victorian slang comes from streets, pubs, theatres and barracks. Suggestionize comes from the courtroom.

Ware recorded it in Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909) as legal slang, in use from 1889 on, and defined it in two words: To prompt. To suggestionize someone is to put an idea into their head — not by telling them outright, but by leading them towards it.

His example shows exactly where the word lived. It comes from a Daily Telegraph report of 16 October 1896 about a trial in which many witnesses had been called to identify the accused. The defence's argument, the paper said, was that these people might have been 'suggestionized' by the influence of the crime on their minds.

That is a surprisingly modern-sounding argument: that a witness can sincerely believe they remember something that was, in effect, suggested to them by everything they had heard. The Victorians simply had a clumsier word for it.

And clumsy it is: suggest turned into a noun, then back into a verb with -ize bolted on. It has the sound of a word coined in a hurry by a barrister who needed one, which may be exactly what it was. Ware gives no inventor, only a date.

We found it only in Ware and the newspaper report he quotes, so it does not seem to have travelled far. Plain suggest, prompt and lead did the job without the extra syllables. But as a glimpse of a late Victorian courtroom arguing about how a witness's mind works, it is a small, telling word.