Roots

How to spell roots

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce roots

What does roots mean?

1. nounThe underground parts of a plant that anchor it and absorb water and nutrients.
2. nounA person's family origins, ancestry, or cultural background.
3. nounThe parts of the hair closest to the scalp, often where new growth or a different colour shows.

Roots in a sentence

• The tree's roots had cracked the garden path.

• He traced his family roots back to a village in Italy.

• Her dark roots were starting to show beneath the blonde dye.

• Deep roots help the shrub survive the dry summer.

• Living abroad made her appreciate her cultural roots.

• The salon booked her in to touch up her grey roots.

Where does roots come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The word descends from the Old Norse rot, meaning the underground part of a plant, which entered English in the late Old English period and gradually displaced the native Old English term wyrt (still surviving in words like 'mugwort'). The Norse rot traces back to a Proto-Germanic form that is also the distant ancestor of 'wort' and is related to the Latin radix, meaning 'root', from which we get 'radish' and 'radical'. By the Middle Ages the singular 'root' had grown a rich figurative life, standing for the source or origin of something, and the plural 'roots' became a natural way to speak of a person's ancestral origins and heritage. The spelling stays pleasingly regular: the double 'o' simply represents the long 'oo' vowel, and the trap is mostly hearing the plural ending as the 'ts' cluster rather than misjudging the vowel. Because it sounds identical to the unrelated 'routes' in some accents, the two are a genuine confusable pair in writing.

How the word is built

• root (from Old Norse rot: underground part of a plant)
• -s (plural suffix)