681: termite Oct 19, 2016

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It might be easy, even for those with mighty brain-power, to assume that 'termites' are a type of mite. There are ordinarily plenty of words which can't act as their own words, but still attach to other words, e.g. a 'cran' is not a type of berry even though we have 'cranberry'. This would be an example of what is called a "bound morpheme", and the sure only way to know that 'ter-' is not one is to look it up. In fact, while 'mite' comes from Old English, 'termite' comes from Latin, or you could also look and see that their scientific names are completely different. Termites are also sometimes called, 'white ants', but this is equally misleading.

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