Expanding One’s Research-Reading Vocabulary by Knowing Prefixes

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

I’m extra busy now because I’ll leave soon to attend the American Medical Writers Association annual conference. At the conference I’ll give a workshop and 2 other sessions on medical journalism. I’ll also give a workshop on medical terminology.

Much of the medical terminology workshop will discuss prefixes, word roots, and suffixes. Of the prefixes, many also occur in specialized non-medical terms.

By knowing common prefixes, one can expand one’s research-reading vocabulary. Here are some prefixes that often appear in English-language terms:

• time-related prefixes: ante- (meaning “before”), pre- (also meaning “before”), post- (“after”), intra- (“during”), inter- (“between”), peri- (“around”)
• prefixes indicating position: pre- (“in front of”), post- (“behind”), intra- (“inside”), extra- (“outside”), inter- (“between” or “among”), peri- (“around”), circum- (“around”), sub- (“under”), supra- (“above”), trans- (“across” or “through”)
• prefixes regarding size or extent: micro- (“small”), macro- (“large”), hypo- (“deficient” or “below normal”), hyper- (“excessive” or “above normal”), multi- (“many”), poly- (“many”)
• prefixes indicating color: erythr- (“red”), leuk- (“white”), cyan- (“blue”), xanth- (“yellow”), melan- (“black”)
• some other common prefixes: anti- (“against”), pseudo- (“false”), mal- (“bad”), dys- (“bad” or “difficult”), eu- (“good” or “well”)

Why do 2 prefixes sometimes mean the same thing? English comes from many languages. Therefore, for example, it sometimes includes Greek and Latin prefixes with the same meaning.

I hope this list will be helpful to you or your students or colleagues. You can find additional lists of prefixes, suffixes, or roots by Internet searching.

Until the next post—

Barbara