Why so many English words are Latin
About six in every ten English words come from Latin or Greek, and in science, law and school textbooks it is closer to nine in ten. The everyday words children already know (house, bread, run, mother) are mostly Old English. The longer words they meet from Year 3 onwards are mostly Latin, and Latin words are built from parts. That is why a pupil who knows thirty roots and twenty prefixes can make a good guess at thousands of words they have never seen.
How Latin got into English
- Latin begins. Latin was the language of the Latini, a people living around Rome in the region of Latium. As Rome grew into an empire, Latin spread across Europe and North Africa.
- Roman Britain. The Roman army and administration ran Britain for almost four centuries. The Britons kept speaking their Celtic languages, but Latin words for Roman things stuck: street (strata), wall (vallum), mile (milia passuum, a thousand paces), wine (vinum), cheese (caseus), kitchen (coquina), and place names ending in -chester, -caster and -cester (castra, a camp).
- The Church. Augustine's mission to Kent brought Christianity and Church Latin. Words for church life entered Old English: altar, candle, school, monk, master, verse, pope, temple. For the next thousand years Latin was the language of learning, worship and record-keeping across Europe.
- The Norman Conquest. William's court spoke Norman French, a daughter language of Latin. For three hundred years French was the language of law, government, cooking and fashion, which is why English has judge, jury, parliament, castle, royal, beef, pork and mutton (the animals in the field kept their English names: cow, pig, sheep). Around ten thousand French words came into English this way, and most of them are Latin underneath.
- The Renaissance. Scholars borrowed straight from Latin and Greek to write about new ideas: education, describe, expect, exist, contemplate, atmosphere, skeleton. Some people mocked these as "inkhorn terms", but thousands survived. Shakespeare used many of them for the first time in print.
- Science names things. Scientists across Europe shared Latin as a common language, so new discoveries were named in Latin and Greek: oxygen, bacteria, telescope, photograph, dinosaur, television. Linnaeus gave every living thing a two-part Latin name in 1735, and doctors, lawyers and botanists still use Latin terms today.
- The dictionaries. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) and then the Oxford English Dictionary (first edition completed 1928) traced each word back to its origin. Etymology, the study of where words come from, became a subject of its own.
- The National Curriculum. The spelling appendix for England requires children to learn prefixes and suffixes from Year 1 and Latin and Greek roots by Year 6, so that spelling and vocabulary are taught through word structure rather than by rote.
What the research says about teaching word parts
Teaching children to see the parts inside words is called morphological instruction, and it is one of the better-evidenced approaches in vocabulary teaching.
- Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimated that printed school English contains tens of thousands of word families, far more than any child could be taught one at a time, and that for well over half of the new words a reader meets, the meaning can be worked out from parts the reader already knows.
- Carlisle (2000) found that children's awareness of word structure predicted their reading comprehension in Years 4 and 6, over and above their general vocabulary.
- Bowers, Kirby and Deacon (2010) reviewed 22 studies of morphological instruction and found benefits for reading, spelling and vocabulary. The gains were largest for younger pupils and for weaker readers, and largest when word parts were taught alongside other literacy work rather than in isolation.
- Goodwin and Ahn (2010, 2013) ran two meta-analyses and reported moderate, reliable improvements in decoding, spelling and vocabulary for pupils of all ages, including pupils with dyslexia and pupils learning English as an additional language.
- The Education Endowment Foundation's guidance on improving literacy in Key Stage 2 recommends explicitly teaching the meaning of prefixes, suffixes and roots as part of a planned approach to vocabulary.
- In England, interest in Latin itself has grown again: the Minimus course has introduced primary pupils to Latin since 1999, and the Department for Education's Latin Excellence Programme funded Latin teaching in state secondary schools from 2022.
Using the cards
Show the word and ask for guesses before pressing anything. Break it apart and ask which part they recognise. Reveal the meanings and let pupils rebuild the definition in their own words. Only then show the sentence and definition. Latin mode adds the source word under each part; pupils enjoy spotting the same root in portable, transport and export. Over a term, keep a class root wall and add every new word that shares a root already on it.