If your parents asked you to consent to a nonsensical plan to wake up everybody in the house with a light-sensor alarm clock, would you resent it, or be too sentimental to object?

The above sentence may not make much sense, except as an illustration of how word roots connect many words with related meanings. How many words in the preceding two sentences have as their basis the Latin root sent or sens, meaning “to feel”?

A root is the origin of a word, often from a different language. Recognizing the roots of words can help you understand their meanings. The words consent, nonsensical, sensor, resent, sentimental, sentence, and sense may all be familiar to you. But the root, meaning “to feel,” might help you understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word, like sentient.

993

Many roots form new words by adding prefixes and/or suffixes to the root. The addition of the prefix in- and the suffix -itive turn the root sens into the word insensitive.

Below are some common roots, their meanings, and words derived from these roots.