On the test, you may be asked to identify the meaning of certain words. Often, these words will only appear in a single sentence, not in a passage, so you’ll have minimal context clues. To answer these questions, you’ll need to learn how to use the word itself to find the meaning.
Root words are bases from which many words take their foundational form and meaning. The most common root words are Greek and Latin, and a broad knowledge of these roots can greatly improve your ability to determine the meaning of words in context. Knowing root words cannot always provide the exact meaning of a word, but combined with an understanding of the word’s place in the sentence and the context surrounding the word, it will often be enough to answer a question about meaning or relationships.
Prefixes are added to the beginning of a word and frequently change the meaning of the word itself by indicating an opposite or another specifically altered meaning.
A suffix, on the other hand, is added to the end of a word and generally indicates the word’s relationship to other words in the sentence. Suffixes can change the part of speech or indicate if a word is plural or related to a plural.
These tables in the links below list common root words, prefixes, and suffixes. You don’t need to memorize all of them, but it will help to be familiar with them.
Common Roots
Common Prefixes
Common Suffixes