Word Clues the Vocabulary Builder

This book is as student friendly and teacher friendly as it was when I was in high school. As a teacher of English to speakers of other languages now, I highly recommend this book. What a wondeful way to build a greater vocabulary for yourselves and for your students.

This is a text that I teach which I've also given several times as a gift to serious word lovers! It's especially helpful for those of us who never had the opportunity to take Latin or Greek in school.

I first ran into word clues when I was in middle school. Now that I'm homeschooling my daughter in middle school, we use it too. She loves to see how the words go together and is starting to have a deeper understanding of how language works. We use it to discuss how language is used and how it changes. The book is pretty basic, giving the information and some suggestions for exercises, but there are no worksheets as such. I highly recommend this book to anybody wanting to increase their vocabulary, scientific or otherwise.

This was our required text in high school senior English class in 1968. The words I learned from being able to discern their meanings from the roots opened up whole new worlds for me at a time when I had been failing school. You can go into Klein's Etymological Dictionary to pick out a word's connection to Sanskrit (i.e. noun=name=nym=nam). Word Clues is broken down into a Latin section and a Greek section. It would be a great addition to any business communications course. Science and dental-medical students would benefit as well. Knowing roots, prefixes, and suffixes helps one learn how to spell difficult words and understand them, too. The knowledge will stay with you for your lifetime.

I use this book everyday; it is a fabulous find, easy to use, has been in print for 40 some years, is organized in a way that you can look up Greek and Latin suffixes in English. (some books only use Greek alphabet for words, confounding those who did not study ancient Greek language) It is just the right size and can be used to self study and learn how to know what a new word might mean by recognizing the "code" in its prefixes and suffixes and root words.