a root or base word is a unit of meaning (morpheme) which carries the basic or core meaning of a word. in linguistics,a morpheme is the small est grammatical unit in a language and not identical to a word. a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. a root can combine with prefixes and suffixes which is one of the most productive way of word-building. english root words and their meanings are commonly derived from greek and latin roots. if learning the most common of these, the meaning of many words will be able to analyze without having to look them up in a dictionary. the following are sets of common roots along with a sampling of the words you can figure out based on them.