The most common Latin root is
co. This root appears in more words than any other. Literally hundreds of words. It has other forms:
con,
com, and
col; they all mean the same thing.
Together. Or, more specifically, they mean
with, together, or
joined.Kind of nice if you ask me. The most common nugget of meaning, or morpheme, means
together. As in community, connect, coordinate, cohabitate, concentrate, converse, complete.
By comparison, the Latin root
fract, which means
break, and is found in words like
fragment and
fracture, is not very
common (there's that "com" root again) at all.
Of course, the Latin stem
im occurs in a lot of words too
. It means
not, and it also takes the form of
il or
in. It is in hundreds of words. Illegal, illicit, illegitimate, immoral, indignant, inscrutable, impossible, improbable, inconsistent, inedible, incredible, and indelible, to name a few. The list is nearly
infinite. But
im, though common, doesn't really have any meaning of its own. Its a negative. It negates. It doesn't have substance of its own, so its frequency says less about the human condition and more about the convenience of language. It's a
convenience prefix, that can easily be tacked on to the front of a word to create an opposite.
