Greek & Latin Roots, Prefixes and Suffixes

Greek & Latin Roots, Prefixes and Suffixes

No student memorizes every word the HSPT can ask. The realistic goal is different: build a word-attack system so that an unknown word can still be reduced to a usable meaning in about five seconds. That system is morphology - the study of the meaningful parts words are assembled from. Because roughly 60 percent of academic English descends from Latin and Greek, a compact set of word parts unlocks a very large vocabulary.

Morphology pays off four separate ways on this exam: the 15 synonym items, the 9 antonym items, the 10 analogy items, and the 22 standalone vocabulary items on the Reading subtest all reward the same skill.

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The Three Slots in an English Word

Every derived word fills up to three slots, and each slot answers a different question.

Assembled: not able to be believed. Notice that you never needed the dictionary definition - the parts produced it.

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Negation and Direction Prefixes

Negation prefixes are the single highest-value group, because they flip a word's charge. On an antonym item, a flipped charge is often enough to identify the answer without knowing the root at all.

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High-Frequency Roots

Roots carry the idea. The list below covers the families that recur most often on Catholic high school entrance tests.

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Suffixes: The Part-of-Speech Tag

Suffixes rarely change meaning much, but they tell you what kind of word you are holding - and that alone eliminates answer choices, because a correct synonym must be the same part of speech as the target word.

Suffix trap: -ly usually marks an adverb, but friendly, lively, lonely, and cowardly are adjectives. Verbal Classification items exploit this exact exception.

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The Three-Step Decoding Protocol

1. Strip the suffix and note the part of speech.
2. Isolate the root and translate it into plain English.
3. Apply the prefix to set direction or negation, then state the whole meaning in your own words before looking at the answer choices.

Worked Decode 1: incontrovertible

• Suffix -ible = able to be (adjective).
• Prefix in- = not; second prefix contro- = against; root vert = turn.
• Literal: not able to be turned against - that is, impossible to dispute. Synonym: indisputable.

Worked Decode 2: magnanimous

• Suffix -ous = full of (adjective).
• Root magn = great; root anim = spirit, mind.
• Literal: full of great spirit - generous and forgiving toward others. Antonym: petty or vindictive.

Worked Decode 3: cacophony

• Suffix -y forms a noun.
• Prefix caco- = bad, harsh; root phon = sound.
• Literal: harsh sound - a jarring mixture of noise. Antonym: euphony (eu- = good).

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Traps Morphology Cannot Solve

• False roots. Not every matching string is a root: the mal in mall and the cred in credenza are coincidences. Confirm that the assembled meaning actually fits a real sense of the word.
• Disguised prefixes. In- means not in inept but means into in inspire and ingest. When the negation reading produces nonsense, try the directional reading.
• Drifted meanings. Nice traces to Latin nescius (ignorant), which is useless today. Morphology predicts modern meaning well for academic words and poorly for old, common ones - so use it on the hard words, not the easy ones.

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A Two-Week Word-Part Routine

Learn five word parts a day rather than fifty words a day. For each part, write the meaning, three real words that contain it, and one sentence of your own. Five parts a day for two weeks yields 70 parts, which is enough coverage to make an educated attack on nearly any unfamiliar HSPT item - a far better return than memorizing 700 isolated definitions.