Everything about Root Word totally explained
The
root is the primary
lexical unit of a
word, which carries the most significant aspects of
semantic content and can't be reduced into smaller constituents.
Content words in nearly all
languages contain, and may consist only of, root
morphemes. However, sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word minus its
inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. 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.
Roots can be either
free morphemes or
bound morphemes. Root morphemes are essential for
affixation and
compounds.
The root of a word is a unit of meaning (morpheme) and, as such, it's 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 don't alter the roots in any way. In particular, English has very little inflection, and hence a tendency to have words that are identical to their roots. But more complicated inflection, as well as other processes, can obscure the root; for example, the root of
mice is
mouse (still a valid word), and the root of
interrupt is, arguably,
rupt, which isn't a word in English and only appears in derivational forms (such as
disrupt,
corrupt,
rupture, etc.). The root
rupt is written as if it were a word, but it's not.
An example of a widely used English root is WR, as in wring, write, wrestle, writhe, etc., where it has a basic meaning of twisting.
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've
ga
do
l and
gdo
la (masculine and feminine forms of the adjective "big"),
ga
da
l "he grew",
higdil "he magnified" and
magdelet "magnifier", along with many other words such as
go
de
l "size" and
migdal "tower".
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