When Roots Mislead: Lookalikes and Double Roots

Check root guesses against context, because some word parts look the same but mean different things.

Root knowledge is powerful, but some roots have twins. 'Ped' can mean foot, from Latin (pedestrian, pedal, pedestal). It can also mean child, from Greek (pediatrician, a children's doctor; pedagogy, the art of teaching children). A pediatrician does not treat feet. Similarly, 'mal' means bad in 'malfunction', but 'mall' is unrelated. 'Inflammable' looks like it means 'not flammable', yet it means 'easily set on fire', because the in- here means into, not not, from 'inflame'.

That confusion is exactly why many labels now say 'flammable'. So treat a root as a hypothesis, not a final answer. Read: 'The pediatrician checked the baby's ears. ' If you guessed foot doctor, the sentence would not make sense, because she is checking ears on a baby. Context corrects you. The habit is: guess from the parts, test the guess in the sentence, and switch to the other meaning or a dictionary if it fails.

• 1Some roots look identical but come from different words.
• 2A root guess is a hypothesis to test in context.
• 3If the sentence does not make sense, rethink the root.