917: de- Jun 13, 2017

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English is a Germanic language but takes a lot of the vocabulary from Romance languages due to its somewhat complicated history. This lexicon is not only appears in whole words but many times from affixes as well. There are plenty of words that historically had Latinate prefixes that are now not removable, but plenty still operate as prefixes. Either as a prefix, like with the word 'decry' but also just as part of the word, such as with 'descend' and 'decline', 'de-' appears in a lot of different terms but does not have the same function for each. In these and other words with 'de-', either as a historical prefix or as a current prefix, it does not always indicate the same thing; there are some examples that relate in some way to going down and others meaning 'removal of'. In Latin this difference would have been very clear, as there was a prefix 'des-' which usually appears in English as 'dis-' as in 'disrespect' denoting 'lack of' while there was a separate preposition 'de' that could mean 'from', giving English all of the words now indicating a downwards direction.

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