English is amongst the wordiest languages. Perhaps the wordiest. It boasts of a million plus words. 80% of which are borrowed from other languages. Contrast it with French, which has some 10,000 words. An average educated english-speaking person has a basket of 20,000 words! Although we use about 2000 words a week. Words fall into categories and patterns. I have attempted to put together a list of word classification which, in practice, are easy to identify with and often used, but their nomenclature is not necessarily so.
- Antonyms: Opposites
- Synonyms: Reason why Thesaurus is in business.
- Buzzword: a popular word relating to a particular activity or subject
- Calibrate Expectation | Outside the box | Push the envelope | Sea change | Boil the ocean | Cloud Computing | Integrated Marketing
- Catchword: a popular word relating to a particular idea, class or quality.
- Sexy
- Demonym: word used to refer to one’s origin or country.
- Example Parisian, Indian, Egyptian
- Derivation: a word that comes from another language
- False friend: a pair of words that sounds similar in 2 languages but have different meanings.
- Actual in English and Aktuell (at present) in German
- Stanza in Italian means room
- Carte (card, menu) in French and cart in English
- Adept (proficient) and Adepte (follower) in French
- Affluent (wealthy) and Affluent (tributary of a river) in French.
- After in German means anus.
- Apologie is praise in French
- Homograph = Homo (similar) + Graph (writing). Words which are written identically but mean and are often pronounced differently.
- Bark: Dog | Tree
- Beat: with a stick | Music
- Axes: plural of both axis and axe.
- Compound: Chemical | Playground
- Content: ingredients | satisfied
- Now that you have got the hang of it try these: Bat | Bow | Coordinates | Bust | Desert | Digest | Discount | Fine | Lead | Minute | Object | Produce | Putting | Refuse | Row | Second | Subject | Tear | Wind | Wound | Lie | Lead | Close | Bear | Bank | Back | Bar | Capture | Change | Conduct | Console | Contest | Converse | Convert | Defect | Foot | Letter | Light | Live | Match | May | Mind | Park | Rock | Rose | Spirit | Transport | Yard | Wave
- Homophone = Homo (similar) + Phone (Sound). Word pairs with similar pronunciation but different meanings and spellings.
