Advanced Vocabulary Words: Ostracize to Potable

Six of the nine words here are Latin roots with a suffix bolted on, and the suffix is doing more work than most readers notice. Potable and plenary look intimidating until you separate them into a root and an ending, at which point they become almost obvious.

The group also contains one of the most misunderstood words in English. Pardon does not mean what most people assume it means, and the gap between pardon and being cleared of a charge is a real legal distinction that shows up in news writing all the time.

Ostracize, pardon, pare, penchant, perpetuate, placebo, plenary, and potable are advanced English words about excluding and forgiving, cutting back and keeping going, and personal leanings. Several are a Latin root plus a suffix such as -able or -ary, so identifying the suffix tells you the word’s job in a sentence.

How suffixes make these words readable

Potable means safe to drink. It is Latin potare, to drink, plus -able, able to be. Able to be drunk. It has nothing to do with a pot, which is the wrong guess almost everyone makes first. The same root gave potion, and here is a detail worth keeping: poison and potion are the same word arriving in English by two different routes, both from a Latin noun meaning a drink.

Plenary means attended by all qualified members, or complete in authority. Its root is Latin plenus, full, which also produced plenty, plentiful, and replenish. A plenary session is a full session, with everyone present, as opposed to a committee meeting where a handful of members do the work.

Placebo is Latin for “I shall please,” from placere, to please, the source of placid, placate, and complacent. It names an inactive treatment used for comparison or reassurance. The etymology tells you the point: the placebo is not there to treat anything, it is there to satisfy an expectation, which is exactly why researchers use it as a comparison.

Pardon vs. exonerate: a distinction with real consequences

Pardon means to forgive an offense or release someone from its penalty. It comes from Latin perdonare, built from per-, thoroughly, plus donare, to give, and it belongs with donate, donor, and condone. To pardon is to give something away completely, in this case the penalty.

That is the whole point. A pardon addresses punishment. It does not by itself declare that the person never did the thing.

Both words can appear in the same news story about the same person, and they mean different things. When a governor agrees to pardon a wrongly convicted man, the governor is removing the punishment; evidence that clears him is what exonerates him.

Ostracize, and the vote written on a broken pot

Ostracize means to exclude someone from a group. In ancient Athens, citizens could vote to banish a person by scratching his name onto a fragment of broken pottery. The Greek word for that fragment was ostrakon, and it gave the English verb its name. The image is worth keeping, because it captures what the word still means: exclusion decided by a group, not by one person. Classmates who ostracize someone for a single mistake are acting collectively, which is precisely what makes the word sting.

Penchant, and the words that all mean leaning

Penchant means a strong liking or tendency. It came from French pencher, to lean, which traces back to a Latin verb meaning to hang, the source of pending, pendant, suspend, and depend.

Once you see that, a pattern appears across the whole language. Almost every English word for a personal tendency is a leaning or hanging word. Inclination is from a Latin verb meaning to lean. Propensity is hanging forward. Proclivity is a forward slope. Even the plain English word bent works the same way. A penchant for solving difficult puzzles is a lean toward puzzles, and the metaphor is the same one every time.

Pare and perpetuate

Pare means to trim away the outer part or reduce gradually. The gradual part matters. A team that pared unnecessary steps from a procedure did so by shaving them off, not by scrapping the procedure. That is why pare down sounds natural and pare away entirely does not.

Perpetuate means to cause something to continue indefinitely, and it carries a warning label in ordinary use. Look at what people actually perpetuate: a myth, a stereotype, an error, a cycle. The word is not a synonym for preserve. Preserving something means protecting it from harm because it is worth keeping; perpetuating something means causing it to keep going, often when it should have stopped. Repeating a rumor would perpetuate the error.

One rare word rounds out the group. Philomath means a person who loves learning, and you will rarely meet it, but both halves are valuable. Philo- means love and built philosophy, the love of wisdom, and philanthropy, the love of humankind. The second half comes from a Greek verb meaning to learn, which is also where mathematics comes from. Mathematics, quite literally, means the things that are learned.

A routine for suffix-built words

1. Cut the suffix off and see what remains. If the leftover looks like a Latin verb, you are on the right track.
2. Translate the suffix into plain English. -able means able to be, -ary means relating to, -ate makes a verb, -ous means full of.
3. Reassemble the meaning out loud. Able to be drunk. Relating to fullness. Say it before you look it up.
4. Check your answer against the sentence you found the word in. If the parts and the sentence disagree, trust the sentence and look the word up.

Practice questions

1. A filter is used on river water and a sign afterward reads “potable.” What has the filter accomplished, and which two word parts told you?
2. New evidence proves a man never committed the crime. Separately, a governor removes his sentence. Which action pardons him, and which exonerates him?
3. Which of these can you perpetuate, and which would you preserve: a historic building, a false rumor, a family recipe, a harmful stereotype?
4. A committee of six meets to draft a proposal, and later the entire hundred-member body meets to vote on it. Which meeting is the plenary session?
5. Explain the difference between saying someone has a penchant for arguing and saying someone argued once.
6. What does a placebo contain, and why does a study include one at all?

Answers

1. The filter has made the water safe to drink. The parts are Latin potare, to drink, and the suffix -able, able to be, giving able to be drunk.
2. The governor pardons him by releasing him from the penalty. The new evidence exonerates him by clearing him of the accusation itself. A pardon addresses punishment, not guilt.
3. You would preserve the historic building and the family recipe, because preserving means protecting something worth keeping. You would perpetuate the false rumor and the harmful stereotype, because perpetuating means causing something to continue, and the word usually implies it should not.
4. The hundred-member meeting. Plenary comes from Latin plenus, full, and means all qualified members are present.
5. A penchant is a settled tendency, a habitual leaning toward something. Arguing once is a single event and says nothing about the person’s inclinations.
6. A placebo contains no active treatment. A study includes one so that researchers can compare the real treatment against the effect of simply being treated, which separates the medicine’s action from expectation.

Where this fits

Suffixes are the quiet half of word building. Prefixes change what a word means, while suffixes usually change what job it does in a sentence, and knowing both halves is what makes an unfamiliar word readable on sight. For the full sequence and the reading lessons alongside it, visit the full vocabulary study hub. Earlier stretches include abate through ardent, assimilate through charisma, the chasm to concoct group, and confident through demise.