When it comes to studying vocabulary, it’s worth knowing how words can be broken down or how they are formed. One of the structures that can help form words is a prefix – simply, any letters that appear before the root of a word.
Prefixes can be used before many words to add additional meaning. For example, the word prefix itself includes a common prefix, pre – meaning before. Once you know that, you can use this prefix to understand other words that you might not be familiar with: prepared, prearranged, preschool, and all manner of hyphenated pre- words (e.g. pre-dinner) all have some connection to something happening before.
Here’s a few more thoughts on how to identify and understand prefixes, followed by a quick exercise.
Prefixes can be used for many purposes, such as telling us quantities (bimonthly means twice a month), or reversing/negating the meaning of a word (e.g. happy and unhappy). Learning prefixes is essentially another area of learning vocabulary, but it’s a very useful one, as once you understand one prefix you can start to work out other words.
For example, do you know what the prefix tele- means in English? If not, consider some words that use it as a prefix:
- television
- telescope
- telegram
What do these words have in common? They’re all to do with communicating or observing something at a distance. Tele-, in fact, comes from ‘far off’, so essentially when you see words using tele- it means something used over a distance: telegraph (send a message over a distance); teleconference (a group meeting done long-distance); telepathy (understand thoughts from a distance); telemetric (measuring/collecting far away information).
Meanwhile, it is also possible that multiple prefixes provide a similar meaning. As mentioned above, some prefixes can create opposite or negative meanings for a word, such as in-, dis-, and ir-. These are used the same way, to the same effect, but there are no real rules about which one is most appropriate for which root – try to learn the correct prefix for the most common words.
To put these ideas into practice, I’ve prepared two exercises that can help test your understanding of prefixes:
Exercise 1: Guess the Prefix Meaning
The following prefixes are presented with example words; can you match the prefix to its meaning?
- Uni- (unisex, unicycle, universal) (a) twice or by twos
- Sub- (subway, subtract, submarine) (b) one, same, whole
- Mis- (misunderstanding, misadventure) (c) again, back
- De- (delist, deforest, decentralise) (d) under or low
- Re- (return, review, recover) (e) not
- Un- (unimpressed) (f) remove or reduce
- Bi- (biweekly) (g) wrong, bad
- Multi- (multiply) (h) many, (usually more than two)
Exercise 2: Prefixes for Opposites
The following groups of words each use the same prefix to create an opposite/negative meaning. Match them to the prefix.
- happy, lucky, important, stoppable, tidy, (a) in
- possible, pregnable (b) dis
- reparable, responsible, regular (c) im
- honest, agree, organized, appear (d) mis
- logical , legal (e) un
- decisive, correct, capable (f) il
- understand , inform, calculate (g) ir
Can you think of three more words for each prefix?
Answers
Exercise 1
- b – Uni = one, same whole
- d – Sub = under or low
- g – mis = wrong or bad
- f – de = remove, reduce
- c – re = again, back
- e – un = not
- a – bi = twice or by twos
- h – multi = many (usually more than two)
Exercise 2
- e
- c
- g
- b
- f
- a
- d
Great article, thank you!
One question though: in ex.1, p.4, are you sure “delete” belongs on this list? Oxford Dictionary says it came from the Latin word “delere”. Also there seems to be no such root-word if you remove the prefix (“lete”), so it would be better to use another example here, like “delist”, for example.
Hi, sorry for the slow reply – thank you for that, I see what you mean, perhaps it does not take the prefix! I wonder if there is still a connection, but without knowing for sure indeed I will change that.