Completing this book brings me to the end of a cycle of reference books focused entirely on words alone. It’s not surprising to find that the shorter the book, the more I enjoyed reading it. While the dictionary and thesaurus managed the same score in different ways, the Dictionary of Root Words and Combining Forms was its own animal and it shows in the scores.Rating criteria refresher.
Toolbox Level 1: A-
After that introductory paragraph, this probably looks like a regression. This is the same rating that the dictionary and the thesaurus each earned in this same category. It still feels like a cop-out to hand it out yet again, but it still fits, given the limitations of a book containing mostly fragments. I only counted three errors at the most- two for spelling and one for a word root being placed out of alphabetical order.
Toolbox Level 2: A-
This score is also identical to those of the preceding two books at this level. What I like in this book is that the content of the minority of pages that can be analyzed for style lives up to the purpose the author claims. Donald J. Borror wrote this book to help people. There’s not an ounce of holier-than-thouness in the introduction and no attempt to sell this book as the best of its kind. But there are only 12 pages in the whole book with fully formed sentences to analyze. That didn’t leave me enough room to justify an A here.
Fulfillment of Purpose: A
Unlike the dictionary and thesaurus, I gave this book the highest possible marks here. Where a physical dictionary may no longer be necessary thanks to online tools, I feel this book easily justifies its existence on the shelf of any science-minded individual. It’s compact and far from cumbersome to pick up and search through. Most science terms come out of Latin and Greek, so I can’t knock it for only featuring 141 root words coming from other languages.
My one quibble still arises over one of the closing sections. I think a case could be made for putting the three-page section on formulating words from these roots at the beginning of the book. I can see how that might tempt some eager beavers to try doing so right out of the gate, but that assumes there are enough weirdos like me out there who will read a book such as this from cover to cover. In case there are enough of us odd ducks out there, I can see how the placement of the word formulation guidelines might be warranted.
Reading Experience: B
I didn’t take the same detached approach to reading this book that I adopted with the thesaurus. Perhaps that stems from positive memories from the high school biology class that forced me to buy this book. This book is almost entirely word etymology, which was one of the components I enjoyed the most about the dictionary. Words alone get boring, but some new ones may stick enough to expand your vocabulary. The structure of words, however, is pure knowledge. I won’t retain much of what I read in this book but, over time, I will come back to it when I come across fancy or odd words. That opens the door to lifelong learning. The more I read, the more I’ll turn to this book, and the more parts of it will stick in my memory.
That’s not to say that I read this entire book with equal fervor. I didn’t. Some pages were plenty boring, and this book did very little to improve my lack of interest in words of Latin and Greek origin. They monopolize the market, and overexposure and over-saturation gets boring.
The last portion of the book was also a nice refresher. After nothing but alphabetical root words, the closing section groups common combining forms together in familiar categories like colors, shapes, numbers, and body parts. I very much enjoyed seeing these clusters because it gave the book a meaningful closing. I can’t explain it much more beyond that it just felt good to finish things out that way.
Overall Score: 3.5835 out of 4 (solid B+)
This is a terrific little book. I don’t recommend reading it cover to cover like I did, but it’s a great reference if you’re curious about how certain words are built and what their components mean. It can’t replace a full dictionary but this one ages better. I learned and retained more from this book than either the dictionary or the thesaurus. As the title of this review suggests, however, I plan on pulling this bad boy out when I get to my wife’s Harry Potter books. If nothing else, it will be fun to see if J.K. Rowling actually pieced together her curses and spells correctly or if she just made stuff up on the fly.
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