Dictionary of English Word-Roots: English-Roots and Roots-English

This book first appeared in 1966, and has been through numerous reprints - mine is a 1989 reprint from Littlefield Adams. Word roots are fragments of words (prefixes, suffixes and elements - also known as segmental morphemes) that when assembled give rise to a word. This book is about those fragments - providing two lists, a list of "Roots-to-English" and a reverse list called "English-to-Roots". These lists total 250 pages of relatively small print. BUT what makes this book especially wonderful is the 21 exercises that follow the two word lists. These exercises are very well thought out and enable the reader to explore words in great detail. For example, in the exercise titled Words from One Root, the root GEN is defined as "cause, birth, kind, race". There then follows a list of 50 definitions - such as "to cause", "relating to heredity", "one who is born brilliant", "a major class or kind", "of a true kind" (The answers are generate, genetics, genius, genus, genuine). Overall, this is a wonderful book - highly recommended.