In the short lecture, we'll be discussing word parts. So all words are made out of
various word parts and there are three major types of word parts. We have the
first part which is called a 'root'. A 'root' has a specific meaning and can occur at the
beginning, middle, or end of a word.
The next type of word part is called a 'prefix'. Prefixes are added to the
beginning of the word, and the third type of word part is called a 'suffix'. Suffixes
are added to the end of a word. Now we're going to discuss each of these three
word parts briefly. So we start with roots. Roots are words from either latin
or greek, and a lot of academic vocabulary is formed from these root
words. For example, the root 'bio' means life ,so an example word with this root
'bio' is biology which is the study of life. We have the root 'biblio' which means
book, and an example of this root is 'bibliography'. 'Ling' is another root which
means language, and we can form the word 'linguistics' from this root word 'ling'.
Linguistics is the study of languages. Prefixes are a type of word part that
changes the meaning of the word, and again remember that prefixes go at the
beginning of the word. For example 'micro-' is one type of prefix. It means 'very
small', so if we look at this example we have 'micro-' which means 'very small' plus
the word biology which again means the study of living organisms. We put those
two word parts together 'micro' and the word 'biology' together, and we get
'microbiology' the study of very small living organisms. Here's another example.
This is a very common prefix, one of the most common prefixes. 'un-' which
means 'not', so we have 'un-' plus the word 'happy'.
This is a very simple example, we come up with the word 'unhappy' or not happy
A final example is 'il-' 'Il-' is another prefixe which means 'not'. It's very
common as well. We have 'il-'. We add that to the word 'legal' and we get 'illegal' or
not legal, so you can see that when we add the prefix to a word it changes the
meaning of the word. The third word part is the suffix. So, suffixes change the
word form or the part of speech. One very common suffix is '-er', and as you can see
we have a little dash here that means that it's going to be a suffix ,or it's
going to go at the end of a word. So we have this example. We have the word 'teach'
which is a verb, and we add the suffix '-er' which mean which means 'a person who', and
we get the word 'teacher', so we can see that we start with the verb teach we add
the suffix '-er' and it changes it from a verb to a noun. Take a look at another
one, '-less'. This is another very common suffix. We can take the word 'care' we add
'-less' to it.
, and we get the word 'careless', so we start with a noun 'care', we add the suffix
and we get an adjective, and the final example 'I-Z-E' or '-ize' is a suffix that we
add to the end of the word. For example, we have the word 'final'. We add 'I-Z-E' to it,
and we get 'finalize', so we have a word which is an adjective 'final' we add 'I Z E',
and it turns into a verb. So, it's important to know the three types of
word parts because if you know the three word parts and the meaning of each type
of word part, you can sometimes pretty accurately guess the meaning of word
just based on the word parts.