Dictionary of Families
Some groups of words which may be far apart in terms of alphabetical order are nevertheless closely related from a morphological and semantic point of view, like write, rewrite, unwritten. Learning new vocabulary would be much easier if these “broken families” could somehow be reunited.
That is what Antidote’s dictionary of word families sets out to do: group together words that have a common morphological root and which all revolve around a common meaning. Some members are formed by derivation, in the way that the adjective unwritten is derived from the verb write; others, by composition: the noun watchdog combines the words watch and dog. Of the thousands of morpho-semantic families we have been able to assemble, some of the particularly larger ones attest to the rich derivation system of the English language.