Or at least what you THINK the answer is..

[This message was edited by jusork on 03-16-03 at 01:27 PM.]

I don't know, but it's probably something French. -gasp! oh no! I'm sorry, I said a naughty word!

I'm not exactly sure how to interpret your question, jusork, but I'll assume you mean what root occurs in the most English words, and that by "root" you are prepared to be broad minded and to accept as examples of the root cases where it no longer bears much if any resemblance to any free-standing English word.

The English word stand occurs quite recognizably in a large number of derivatives, including understand, withstand, standout, standby, and many, many others, some of them hyphenated. But if we consider the Indo-European root sta, of which English stand is a reflex, there are almost quite literally countless others. The list includes: stay, stall, starling, steed, stud, stool, oust, rest, arrest, stanch, stanza, stative, stator, circumstance, constant, contrast, substance, distant, distance, cost, extant, existence, instant, obstacle, stable, station, stationary, obstetric, stage, and prostitute (from Latin "to cause to stand forth"), to name just some. Most of the words above can have derivational and declensional endings of a wide variety, which is one reason I would hesitate to even try to count how many separate "words" there are.

In any case, it is a lot, and offhand I can't think of another Indo-European root which has been so productive in English.

Thanks for the explaination, that makes since and it's just fine as what I was looking for.

Thank you for the reply, Jusork. I'm glad to know I was on the right track, at least.

I could very well be wrong about the root sta having the widest occurrence, though, since as I said, I haven't actually done any counting. There are a number of other Indo-European roots which might also be candidates, e.g. bher, meaning to bear or to carry. One thing is pretty clear, though: a root of the sort you seem to have in mind would certainly be Indo-European, not from some other language family. Although English has borrowed words from a great number of languages, the vast majority are based on Indo-European. The case of stand is again instructive here. This is our native Germanic form of the word, but we have also borrowed derivatives of this same word in a variety of forms from Latin and from descendants of Latin (French and Spanish, especially), which accounts for its particularly wide distribution.