root (linguistics)

The basic element (morpheme) of a word, to which affixes can be added to give derived forms. For example, from the root kind, we may derive un-kind, kind-ly, kind-ness, etc. The root carries the core meaning of the word, and prefixes modify that meaning in regular ways. In addition, the suffixes carry grammatical information, marking the form's part of speech, as in kind-ly (adjective), kind-ness (noun). Roots in highly inflected languages normally cannot stand alone. A root to which other elements have been added, so that the form can serve as the basis for inflections, is known as a stem. For example, Latin am- ‘love’ is a root, to which -av- can be added to form the perfect stem amav-; this is then inflected for person and number (amavi ‘I have loved’, amavimus ‘We have loved’, etc).

For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems, and a root in the stricter sense may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem.

The root of a word is a unit of meaning (morpheme) and, as such, it is an abstraction, though it can usually be represented in writing as a word would be. For example, it can be said that the root of the English verb form running is run, or the root of the Spanish superlative adjective amplísimo is ampli-, since those words are clearly derived from the root forms by simple suffixes that do not alter the roots in any way. for example, the root of mice is mouse (still a valid word), and the root of interrupt is, arguably, rupt, which is not a word in English and only appears in derivational forms (such as disrupt, corrupt, etc.).

This distinction between the word as a unit of speech and the root as a unit of meaning is even more important in the case of languages where roots have many different forms when used in actual words, as is the case in Semitic languages. In these, roots are formed by consonants alone, and different words (belonging to different parts of speech) are derived from the same root by inserting vowels. For example, in Hebrew, the root gdl represents the idea of largeness, and from it we have gadol and gdola (masculine and feminine forms of the adjective "big"), gadal "he grew", higdil "he magnified" and magdelet "magnifier", along with many other words.

Reconstructed roots

The root of a word, in etymology, has a somewhat different meaning: it may represent an older form. When several languages are believed to be children of one older language, linguists will compare each language to the rest, trying to find matching words and ultimately reconstruct the ancient root.