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English is a member of the Indo-European language family, and many of its words have their roots in the Proto Indo-European Language (PIE). PIE is not a language that actually existed, but was created by people who thought it was the common ancestor of the languages in the Indo-European language family.
In reality, English has two linguistic ancestors.
They are Anglo-Saxon (Old English), which was spoken by the Anglo-saxons, the direct ancestors of today's English people, and French, the language of the Normans, who ruled England from the 10th century onward, and the Greek and Latin language that French was based on. It's been estimated that English is about 60-70% Latin and 30-40% Old English, but in real-life English, it's more like 50-50.
While there is a plethora of etymology and root data for English, it is limited in a couple of ways.
First, they are organized around roots from the Greek and Latin family.
Second, they are not organized in a way that is based on practical English.
The English roots provided on this site are different from resources elsewhere in two main ways.
First, we are not only looking at Greek and Latin roots and/or etymologies, but also the roots of Old English, which are Anglo-Saxon roots.
Second, we are organizing the roots of the top 5,000 most frequently used words in the English language today.
The alphabetized list table is divided into “Top 5000” and “Other words”.
So you can learn almost any word you need for practical English by just learning the roots provided on this site.
[How to search]
Type the word you want to find in the search box in the upper right corner of the blog, and a list page with the word will appear. Go to the list page and find it.
If the list is long and hard to find, press [Ctrl+F] and you will see the page search button
provided in the window, where you can search once more to see the word you want.
When the list page comes up, select the root-specific detail page. This is a very detailed page of information for that root, and it is constantly being organized.
[How to download PDF files]
Click on any of the alphabetical links shown below to be taken to a table of contents page with
link information for the PDF file.
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