The World of Words: Vocabulary for College Success ... - eLibrary

PART2Word ElementsIn Part 1 of this book, you learned about context clues. Part 2 focuses onword elements, the parts of words that have their own meanings. Unlikecontext clues, which provide hints from the sentence, word elements givehints within the word itself. For example, the parts re- (meaning “back”) andtract (meaning “pull”) are the two elements in the word retract (meaning “topull back”). If you break an unknown word into separate elements, you canoften figure out its meaning. If you then combine context clues with word elementclues, you will have a powerful approach to understanding new words.Prefixes, Roots, and SuffixesCopyright © Cengage Learning. All Right Reserved.PrefixesThere are three kinds of word elements: prefixes, roots, and suffixes.A prefix is a group of letters that is attached to the beginning of a wordroot. A root is the central, or main, portion of a word. A suffix is a groupof letters that is attached to the end of a root. An example of a word thatcontains all three elements is impolitely: im- is the prefix, polite is the root,and -ly is the suffix. Now let us look at each element separately.A prefix such as im- attaches to the beginning of a root. The hyphen at theend of im- shows where the root attaches. When a prefix joins a root, theresult is a new word with a different meaning. In the word impolite, forexample, the prefix im- means “not.” When im- is joined to the root polite,the new word formed by the prefix and root means “not polite.” Next, wecan see what happens when the prefix co-, which means “together,” isjoined to two familiar word roots.co- (together) exist coexist (to exist together)co- (together) operate cooperate (to work or operate together)In both of these examples, the prefix co- changes the meaning of theroot word.131