| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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Appendix I
Indo-European Roots |
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| ENTRY: | krei- |
| DEFINITION: | To sieve, discriminate, distinguish.
Derivatives include garble, crime, certain, excrement, crisis, and hypocrisy.
1. Basic form with variant instrumental suffixes. a. Suffixed form *krei-tro-. riddle1, from Old English hridder, hriddel, sieve, from Germanic *hridra-; b. suffixed form *krei-dhro-. cribriform, garble, from Latin cr brum, sieve. 2. Suffixed form *krei-men-. a. crime, criminal; recriminate, from Latin crmen, judgment, crime; b. discriminate, from Latin discrmen, distinction (dis-, apart). 3. Suffixed zero-grade form *kri-no-. certain; ascertain, concern, concert, decree, discern, disconcert, excrement, excrete, incertitude, recrement, secern, secret, secretary, from Latin cernere (past participle cr tus), to sift, separate, decide. 4. Suffixed zero-grade form *kri-n-yo-. crisis, critic, criterion; apocrine, diacritic, eccrine, endocrine, epicritic, exocrine, hematocrit, hypocrisy, from Greek krnein, to separate, decide, judge, and krnesthai, to explain. (Pokorny 4. sker-, Section II. 945.) |
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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