The CAT Blog

There’s this dictionary program called “Roots of English” which has a very unique feature that I doubt, any other or very few dictionaries must be having.

As you might have guessed from the name of it, when you give it a word, it will return the Greek & Latin roots of the word. It also contains some history of the English language and details on the sources of individual words.

Now how does that help for CAT?

When you come across a word, there are two possibilities:

• You know the exact meaning of the word
• Or it is a completely alienated word to you

In the first case, you shouldn’t have any problem.

In the second, you can make an educated guess towards the meaning of the word, keeping in mind the context of the word. But what if I tell you that there’s a better way to approach it.

You can approach it by breaking it up into its roots. And if you find that it is not possible to break the word into meaningful roots, then you can resort to making an educated guess.

But to be able to make out whether a word can break up into some meaningful roots, you should be knowing some common source roots, which is what Roots of English is going to help you do.

One cool thing about it is that it tests you to gauge what you’ve learnt in a session, with a 10-question random test based on words and roots that you just checked out in that session. 

Apart from the above, the latest version provides examples, quotes, etc. for better understanding.

So log on to http://artsci.shu.edu/classics/classics/rootsof.htm to download the software.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Verbal Ability, Vocabulary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.