Words from Latin
Challenge Words
- soliloquy
- accommodate
- pernicious [8]
- efficacy
- visceral
- exacerbate
- indigenous
- belligerent
- vernacular
- infinitesimal
- recalcitrant
- innocuous
- precocious
- ameliorate
- commensurate
- facetious
- prerogative
- ubiquitous
- egregious
- aggregate
- tertiary
Spelling Tips
- 1 One of the hardest things to remember about words from Latin is whether an internal consonant (like rr in interrupt) is doubled. To reinforce your memory of the correct spelling, try to remember related words all together (like interrupt along with interruption or necessary along with necessity).
- 2 The \ü\ sound (as in ooze) is nearly always spelled with a u in words from Latin. It typically follows a \d\, \j\, \l\, \r\, or \s\ sound. After other consonants, this sound normally becomes \yü\ (as in bugle, refugee, and meticulous).
- 3 Beware of words like crescent in which the \s\ sound is spelled with sc in words from Latin. Other examples include visceral, discern, and discipline.
- 4 When you hear within a word from Latin the \s\ sound followed by any of the sounds of e (long, short, or schwa), there's a possibility that the \s\ sound is spelled with c as in exacerbate, access, adjacent, condolences, facetious, and necessary.
- 5 The letter i is a vowel often used to connect two Latin word elements. If the connecting vowel sound is a schwa (\ə\) and you must guess at the spelling of this sound, the letter i might be a good guess: See carnivore> and herbivore. Other examples include non–study-list words that end in iform such as oviform and pediform.
- 6 The letter k rarely appears in words from Latin, and its sound is nearly always represented by c as in aquatic, prosaic, canary, cognition, mediocre, canine, precocious, Capricorn, and many other words.
- 7 The letter x often gets the pronunciation \gz\ in words from Latin, as in exuberant and exacerbate.
- 8 The combination ious ends many adjectives of Latin origin. When the consonant that precedes ious is c or t, the sound of the final syllable is \shəs\ as in facetious, ostentatious, pernicious, and precocious.