Using word parts to determine meaning

0:00- [Narrator] Hello readers, David here. And today I wanna talk to you about what words are made of. Yeah, yeah, you're probably saying, come on. I already know what words are made of man. They're made of letters. And to you, I say, yes, yes, good. But you are only partly right because in addition to being made of letters, they are also made up of word parts.

0:22I'm going to talk about three different types. One prefixes, two roots, and three suffixes. And I'll go through them in turn and define what they are and what they mean. Why is this important? Because knowing how word parts work can help you determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.

0:42Take the word reusable. I filled my reusable thermos with jam. A very normal thing to do. Doesn't everyone keep their jam in an insulated metal flask? Don't answer that. Now, I'll divide this word up into three parts. We got re, we got use and we got able, reuseable.

1:06So, okay, prefixes, roots, suffixes. Let's start here with prefixes. They're word parts that attach to the start of a word. They're not standalone words themselves, but they can be added to a word to change the meaning. In this case, we've got re, which means again, let me write it again, let me rewrite it.

1:23Now let's move on to roots. The core part of the word, in this case, use. In English, roots usually come from Latin or Greek. Like prefixes, most roots aren't standalone words themselves, but they can be combined with other word parts to make words. The root use in reusable means use and comes from Latin and able is our suffix.

1:45A suffix is like a prefix. It's a word part that usually isn't a word on its own, but it goes on the end of a word, not the start. The suffix able means able to. So a reusable thing is able to be used again. If the thermos were instead unusable because un means not, then it'd be broken.

2:06You could not use it. Now let's see how you can use your knowledge of word parts to help figure out the meaning of a word you might not know. The word is unrevivable. I'll use it in a sentence. She forgot to water it for six weeks so Wanda thought her dry little plant was unrevivable.

2:26Now I'll break up the word and then you'll try to determine the meaning. Unrevivable, right? Okay, so you know what to do. What does unrevivable mean? I'll put on some music. You shout out what you think it means. Meet you back here in 10 seconds, shout it out.

2:45(upbeat music) (birds chirping) - [Speaker] The wood thrush.

2:55- [Narrator] So a thing that is un revivable is a thing that cannot be brought back to life. Vive is a root that means live, right? You might know this root from survive, which means to stay alive, to keep living. So to revive something is to make it live again, right?

3:18And something that is revivable is able to be brought back to life. But something that is unrevivable is not able to be brought to life again or is not able to live again. So in this case, Wanda forgot to water her plant. So now it is unrevivable. She can't bring it back to life.

3:43Prefixes, roots and suffixes, they're everywhere. All right readers, may your plants be revivable and may all your vocab words be easily learnable. See everywhere, you can learn anything, David out.