Proto-Indo-European was spoken around 4500 BCE. These roots became the building blocks of English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and 400+ other languages. Ranked by how many modern English words each root has produced.
A root is the oldest recoverable ancestor of a word — the morpheme from which many modern words descend. Forms marked with * are reconstructed: no written record survives, but comparative linguistics lets us infer they existed.
“to beget, to give birth”
45 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to think”
33 descendants in database
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“to stand”
32 descendants in database
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“to stretch, to hold”
30 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to put, to place, to make”
30 descendants in database
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“to lead, pass over”
28 descendants in database
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“to collect, to gather”
27 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to move in a straight line, to direct, to rule”
22 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to know”
20 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to observe, to look”
19 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to plait, to weave”
19 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to grasp”
18 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to turn, to bend”
18 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to speak”
18 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“to see, to know”
17 descendants in database
View family tree →source:proto-indo-european.org
“trumpet (onomatopoeic)”
2 descendants in database
View family tree →“ghost, spirit, from OHG 'geist,' from Proto-Germanic *gaistaz, from PIE *gʰeys- (to be excited, frightened)”
2 descendants in database
View family tree →“absolute superlative suffix”
2 descendants in database
View family tree →“empty, void (the philosophical concept of emptiness)”
2 descendants in database
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