At its largest, your vocabulary includes all the words whose meanings you either recognize or can deduce from context. This group of words, called your processing vocabulary, allows you to interpret the meanings of many passages whose words you might not use yourself. Your producing or active vocabulary, on the other hand, is more limited, made up of words you actually use in writing or speaking.

An important intellectual goal is to consciously strengthen your producing vocabulary—to begin to use in your own speech and writing more of the words that you understand in context. To accomplish this goal, you must become an investigative reporter both of your own language and the language of others.

Understanding the sources of English

English, like one-third of all languages in the world, descends from Indo-European, a language spoken millennia ago. Scholars began to consider Indo-European a “common source” when they noted striking resemblances among words in a number of languages.

A version of Indo-European was brought to Britain by the Germanic invasions following 449. This early language, called Anglo-Saxon or Old English, was influenced by Latin and Greek when Christianity was reintroduced into England beginning in 597, shaped by the Viking invasions in the late 700s, and transformed by French after the Norman Conquest (1066).

Although English continued to evolve after the conquest, educated people spoke not English but Latin and French, the languages of the church and court. In the late 1300s, Geoffrey Chaucer, writing The Canterbury Tales in the language of the common people, helped establish what is now called Middle English as the legal and literary language of Britain. With the advent of printing in the mid-1400s, that language became more accessible and standardized. By about 1600, it had essentially become the Modern English we use today.

In the past four hundred years, English has continued borrowing from many languages and, as a result, now has one of the world’s largest vocabularies. Modern English, then, is a plant growing luxuriously in the soil of multiple language sources.

Learning word roots

As its name suggests, a root is a word from which other words grow, usually through the addition of prefixes or suffixes. From the Latin root -dic- or -dict- (“speak”), for instance, grows a whole range of words in English: contradict, dictate, dictator, diction, dictionary, predict, and others. Here are some other Latin (L) and Greek (G) roots and examples of words derived from them.

Recognizing prefixes

Originally individual words, prefixes are groups of letters added to the beginning of words or to roots to create new words. Prefixes modify or extend the meaning of the original word or root. Recognizing common prefixes can help you decipher the meaning of unfamiliar words.

Prefixes of negation or opposition

Prefixes of quantity

Prefixes of time and space

Recognizing suffixes

Like prefixes, suffixes modify and extend meanings. Suffixes, which are attached to the end of words or roots, often alter the grammatical function or part of speech of the original word—for example, turning the verb create into a noun, an adjective, or an adverb.

Noun suffixes

Verb suffixes

Adjective suffixes