NOW READING: Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms (1960)

It may come as a surprise that I chose another sort of dictionary for my third book but this is one I’ve been looking forward to. While the word dictionary is in the title, it’s a very lean book- just 142 pages. I’m taking a relaxed approach to getting through it though. This will be another very dry read, but one that I want to pay more attention to than the thesaurus.

I bashed plenty of words of Latin origin during my read of the dictionary, so karma has me swimming against a current of Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes with this book. Donald J. Borror assembled this reference piece to provide students and members of the scientific community with a handy guide for discerning both the meaning and pronunciation of many of the naming roots in many areas of science, especially biology. It may be small but it is dense and broad in scope.

This is the first book in Project Bookshelf that has a story attached to it. I acquired my copy of this book when I took an advanced biology class during my senior year of high school. It was a hard but rewarding class. At times, I spent a couple of hours each night reading and working on homework, making it one of the five most study-intensive classes I think I ever took.

I don’t remember how much of my study time involved my nose being stuck in this book in particular, but the book itself was significant enough to leave a mark. Its cover is worn, folded, and cracked. The page corners are all curved out one direction or another, some even still bearing the scars of being folded over for quick reference. I come to it not as an adversary, but as an old friend.

I plan on highlighting the most interesting prefixes and suffixes that I come across. That aspect of my update posts will be completely subjective. I also plan on looking for the root words in this book that come from sources other than Greek and Latin. Perhaps I’ll even keep a tally. This all will slow me down a little but I’m confident that this book won’t even take me as long as the thesaurus.