Martha spoke recently at an Audubon Society event, where she traced the role of the Latin stem greg-. It’s a form of the Latin word grex meaning “flock” or “herd.” This root appears in many English words involving groups, including aggregate, congregate, gregarious, as well as the word egregious–literally, “standing outside the herd.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Grex Root”
Grant, as you know, I spoke at an Audubon Society event recently.
Yes.
And one of the things I mentioned that caused aha moments for a lot of people was I was talking about the Latin word for flock, like a flock of birds, which is grex, G-R-E-X.
And the stem of that word is G-R-E-G.
And we see that in a whole lot of English words.
Like gregarious?
Like gregarious, yes.
Like congregate.
Aggregation.
Aggregation.
And I love this one, egregious.
Egregious is somebody who literally stands out from the flock.
Because E is a separating word.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s a negative.
It’s like X, yeah.
All from those bird words.
Every week, more evidence from you that I should have studied more etymology.
You do that all the time.
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