Let’s cut right to the core of the issue here: what’s the most important part of an effective English vocabulary study program? That’s a hard question to answer, partly because there are several important aspects to a good study program, and partly because what you might find most important may be different from what another person believes is essential. One thing we can all agree on, however, is that etymology – the study of word origins – is an extremely valuable part of the learning process, because it helps both in understanding the word and in seeing the connections between words. For many people, the root words are also a useful way to remember the basic underlying meanings of words. Today’s set of words show how helpful etymology can be.

The underlying meaning of heart in many words is traceable back either to the Greek root word kardia or the Latin root word cor, both of which mean “heart.” However, these root words may not be evident at first glance. The word heart itself came into English through the German Herz. This might seem a bit of a jump from either kardia or cor, but when you look at the ancestor of Latin, Greek and most other European languages (a reconstructed language called “Proto-Indo-European” which is usually abbreviated as PIE in dictionaries), you find the root word meaning heart in that language was kerd.

From heart, we also get the word hearten. Hearten means to encourage, or literally “to put heart into.” The word encourage also has heart at its core, because it comes from the French courage (and/or Italian corragio), based on the Latin root cor, and meaning “with heart.”

Cordial is a word that originated in the Middle Ages which originally was the name for a medicinal syrup that stimulated the heart. It later became a term meaning “with heart” (so “in a cordial fashion” would have meant warmly, lovingly) but now the word as an adjective has less emphasis, and is closer to the sense of “friendly.”

Moving to the Greek root, we get many words used in the medical field, such as cardiac (“relating to the heart”) and tachycardia (“swift[-beating] heart”) and echocardiogram (“sound-heart-measure”).

Knowing the correct etymology of a word is important, because there are often false cognates that may lead you to believe a word has an origin that it does not. For example, the words hearth and cornucopia have no relationship to the word heart, though you might think that a hearth is the symbol (or center) of a home, and a cornucopia spills abundance from its core. Instead, the origin of hearth comes from the Old German Herd, a fireplace; the word cornucopia has the Latin root cornu-, meaning “horn,” because of its shape.

We hope you now have a hearty appetite for your own etymological explorations!