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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Morphology and Word Formation

Root

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/ruːt/nounCore term

In linguistics & grammar, root means: The core part of a word that carries its basic meaning and cannot be broken into smaller meaningful parts, such as 'form' in reformation or 'kitap' in kitaplık.

In Turkish: kök

How it is used

Used in morphology and vocabulary teaching. Many English roots come from Latin or Greek (dict, scrib, graph), so knowing them helps with academic words. Root and stem are sometimes used loosely as synonyms, but linguists keep them apart.

Example sentences

  1. The Greek root 'graph' appears in photograph, graphic and autograph.

  2. Find the root of each word first, then look at what the affixes add.

Common collocations

  • Latin root
  • Greek root
  • root word
  • verb root
  • stemThe part of a word to which inflectional endings are added; it can be a bare root (walk) or a root with derivational affixes (teacher in teachers).
  • affixA piece added to a word to change its meaning or grammatical form, such as a prefix at the start (re-) or a suffix at the end (-ed).
  • morphemeThe smallest part of a word that has its own meaning or grammatical job, such as un-, happy and -ness in unhappiness.
  • derivationThe process of making a new word from an existing one, usually by adding an affix, as when teach becomes teacher or happy becomes unhappy.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Morphology and Word Formation

Practise with graded reading

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