The Roots Series · Greek
Greek Roots
The hardest words in English are the easiest to read.
Listen · Read · Repeat · Rate · Fight
Nobody memorises cardiomyopathy. They read it — cardio·myo·pathy, heart + muscle + suffering: a disease of the heart muscle, spelled out in Greek parts. The longer the word, the more it tells you.
The layer above Latin
When English needs to name something precisely, it reaches for Greek.
English does its everyday work in Germanic words and its arguing in Latin — but its naming is Greek. Telescope, democracy, xenophobia, chromosome, bradycardia: every one assembled from a small kit of Greek parts, the same few pieces recombined across technology, politics, biology, and medicine.
The kit is small and ruthlessly regular. Learn -phobia once and claustrophobia and xenophobia open together. Learn -ology and you hold the name of every science at once. This is the vocabulary of textbooks, journals, and hospital charts — the register where precision is the whole point — and it is built to be read, not memorised.
A few dozen Greek prefixes, roots, and suffixes — the pieces science and medicine build every name from.
Read a five-syllable monster apart into its parts, and it turns out to be a plain sentence in disguise.
A word is an assembly
Every word here is colour-coded by part. Tap one to take it to pieces.
The toolkit you start with
The pack opens in the Greek you already own — the technology in your pocket speaks it.
One root, a whole family
Each cluster is a family of Greek parts and the English words built from them. Learn it once.
Thirteen words, one root — running from the sofa to the clinic. The path that feels-with in sympathy is the same one that suffers in neuropathy. See it once, and both ends of the register belong to you.
From gadget to diagnosis
The pack runs five tiers, T1 to T5 — from the technology in your pocket to the chart at the foot of the hospital bed.
- microscopictoo small to be seen without the aid of a microscope
- syndromea group of symptoms that consistently occur together, characterizing a particular condition
- cryptichaving a meaning that is mysterious or difficult to interpret
- polymatha person of exceptionally wide-ranging knowledge across many different fields
- bradycardiaan abnormally slow heart rate
Flashcards as an integrated system
- Root clusters
- 1,000 cards, 1,000 words, in 55 root clusters across five tiers — each cluster one family of Greek parts, learned side by side.
- Fibonacci SRS
- Rate each card 0–5. The better you know a word, the longer before it returns — spaced repetition on Fibonacci intervals.
- Boss fights
- Each root cluster is gated by a duel you can't win without confronting and overcoming its hardest members.
- Graduation
- Beat a cluster and its cards leave your daily deck for good. The deck gets smaller as you learn.
- Etymology
- Every card names the root, shows the real Greek word in its own script — τῆλε, λόγος — and spells out exactly how the parts assemble. You don't need to read Greek; you learn to recognise it.
- Audio
- Clean Piper text-to-speech on every word and example sentence.
- Lessons
- Reference lessons fire at the point in the sequence where they unlock what you're about to read.
Part of the Roots Series
The shape of English and its neighbours, made visible.
The Germanic backbone of everyday English — the words you already half-know.
The second English — 1066 and the French that came with it.
English built from its parts — the classical and scientific layer, assembled.
The vocabulary of science, medicine, and abstraction — the layer above Latin.
You are hereRead the biggest words first.
1,000 cards · 1,000 words · 55 root clusters · the real Greek, in Greek script, on every card. The complete word list, every reference lesson, and a playable boss-fight demo are on the website.
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