•February 1, 2023•

By Jim Baumann
NP Guest Writer

Several questions arose while my wife and I were driving to a place that would surely serve us Italian bread: Does bread raise or does it rise? Does the baker raise the dough or rise it? What the heck is a transitive verb?
Questions like these constitute about 85% of our conversations.
So today we’ll take a look at “raise” and “rise” and their various usages and homophones.
Let’s start with the issue of bread.
Although I’ve heard it expressed both ways bread indeed “rises.” I often supplement my research by plugging words and phrases into Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks usage in books published in the United States.
I compared “the bread rises” to “the bread raises,” and what I got was interesting.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.