General Writing and Grammar Help: How Do You Recognize the Root?

Question: General Writing and Grammar Help: How Do You Recognize the Root?

Answer: There are two articles on this site that contain lists of many of the common prefixes and suffixes that are found in English. They are A Little Etymology and Etymology - English Words With Latin Prefixes. There are also a few specialized pages, like Geometry terms, Latin Numbers, and Plant Names. If you see one of the prefixes from these lists on an English word, you remove it and are probably left with the root word with a possible ending. Unlike the prefix, having the ending on the word usually won't distort the meaning of the basic word significantly.

If you have a word like polyandry (having many husbands), the prefix is poly- meaning many.

If you look in a dictionary (not online), you can see many words beginning with poly-. That is, by the way, another excellent way to distinguish a prefix from the root.

What is left is -andry. This is not a word in English. Y is a common ending in English words, but if you take it off, you're left with andr- which is definitely not an English word. At this point, since you have a word stripped of its prefix and ending, you can look in a Latin or Greek dictionary to see if you can find something that begins andr. The word comes from andros and means man.

Although English words do make use of multiple prefixes, as in the classic "anti-dis-establishmentarianism", most English words have one prefix at most and a root word.

If you start looking for prefix after prefix in the same word, you are likely to land in trouble. For example, in polyandry, you might see the poly-, strip it off, then see the a- or an- and think it's one of those negating forms as in theist/atheist archist/anarchist. If you strip off this "second" prefix, you have "dr" which doesn't look like and isn't an English word or root at all. So stick with stripping off one prefix until you're sure you understand.