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Last Halloween, I was doing an activity with a student based on photos of people in costumes. One student remarked that someone's costume was hideous. I marked it down for investigation one day. I wonder if there's a relationship to the free base hide? After all, if something is hideous, it makes me want to run and hide?
In our investigation, we'll look at the word's definition and how context could obscure it. As we look further at the base, we'll look at a not-so-common connecting vowel letter. A historical look at our word takes us to the period of the Norman Invasion and Middle English. Finally, we'll examine some suffixes that are historically related and some that are semantically related.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
I was impressed with my student's use of this word. Their vocabulary in use is often simple or slang, like yukky or disgusting, or gross in this case. To ascertain if they really understood the meaning of the word, I showed another photo of a child in a princess costume, a child with an axe embedded in their head, and another of a child dressed as a skeleton, and asked, "Is this hideous?" Their response told me that they understood that a princess would not be considered hideous. Neither would a skeleton made up of smooth white bones. They understood hideous to be something "ugly or unattractive" as the entry in the Collins dictionary explains.
When students over-rely on context to gain meaning, and the context remains the same, they can misinterpret a word's meaning. What might be hideous outside of Halloween? Can someone's prom dress be hideous? What might be hideousthat isn't a costume or something you wear? Could the school lunch be hideous? According to another definition provided by the Collins entry, a school lunch could be hideous if it's "unpleasant to bear."
I may follow up with a student by presenting various items or scenarios and ask them to respond, "That is hideous," if the item or situation is hideous and "That is not hideous" if it is not. I want them to have practice with many contexts in which something could be hideous. I also want to provide practice with their oral use of the word.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
Several of our recent investigations, such as trepidatious and ubiquitous have led to an analysis that includes the suffix
ubi + que/ + it + ous
trepid + ate/ + i +ous
hide + ous?
Every word contains a base or is a base. If a student gave me the previous word sum, I might ask, "Which element do you propose is the base?" They might say
Like me, they may wonder about a relationship to the free base hiding and hides. We will have to look up both in an etymological resource to be sure. Let's go to Etymonline.
The entry for hideous says the word came from the Anglo-French word hidous around the year 1300. In this period of the history of our language, Middle English, there was a large French influence on the language due to the 1066 Norman Invasion. The Normans were a group of Norse that had settled in the northern part of modern-day France. The variety of French they spoke was different than in the south of France; therefore, it is sometimes referred to with the Anglo or Norman nomenclature.
The entry says that this word may have a Germanic origin. There is controversy with a possible ancestor, the Latin hispidus, "shaggy; bristly." However, from this entry, the consensus seems to be the origin is with the word hisda, "horror; fear." This certainly aligns with its meaning in Modern English.
The entry for hide, meaning "conceal," however, has a different history. It is from Old English hydan and has a West Germanic origin. What about hide as in "skin of an animal?" The entry for that word says it too is from Old English. These two Old English words were actually related. Semantically there is a connection with "covering." I actually found a third entry for hide as a measure of land. This is not related to hideous nor is it related to those previous two entries from Old English.
For the purpose of our word sum, we might ask why the vocalic suffix <-ous>. It seems as if the connecting vowel letter?
hide/ + e + ous?
It is possible that the hiding.
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
So far, we have found three various hideous is from a different root than all three; therefore, they would not appear in a matrix together. Looking at the meanings of words before designing a matrix is imperative.
Does hideous have any other relatives that might be grouped in a matrix? To find out, I might plug the root hisda into the search engine of Etymonline and check out my discoveries. No luck there.
Wiktionary, another resource I use for historical information, gives me unhideous, its opposite, and hideously, an adverb form. We have the noun form hideousness. We also have the noun form hideosity. The suffixes doublets, so to speak. The suffixal construction <-ity>.
curious/curiosity
monstrous/monstrosity
generous/generosity
Semantically, the suffix careful. Similarly, the noun would be carefulness.
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
The base of this word, which also happens to be its first syllable, is pronounced with what many of us refer to as "short ." (you might remember that "long" and "short" vowels have no relationship in English to the duration of their pronunciation.) Again, we have a similar word, hid, in English that is the past tense spelling of hide, "conceal." It's possible that the strong verbs.
We also know that if the famous or nervous.
The suffix
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Next Steps
What concepts from this investigation can we explore next to learn more about the English orthographic system?
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Do you have students with a narrow or limited sense of a word's meaning? Try presenting those words in various contexts. |
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Most of the time, the connecting vowel letter in Latin is . There's usually a reason for an |
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Some suffixes are cognate, meaning they are born from the same root and related etymologically, like |
The suffix derivational suffixes I teach. When derivational suffixes are added to a base, they often change a word's class. Reliably, the suffix <-ous> helps us form adjectives. Through this investigation, we also learned that a suffix has its own meaning, structure, relatives, and phonology. I'm interested in an investigation you and your students do with a suffix you are interested in. Reply to this email and let me know how it went!
Stay curious,
Brad
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P.S. Know a teacher who might enjoy untangling the gruesome layers of hide and hideous? Forward this to them and compare notes!
P.P.S. Thinking some more about connecting vowel letters. It reminds me of when people define morphemes as "smallest units of meaning in a word." That definition invites all types of confusion. I mean, a connecting vowel letter doesn't exactly have meaning in the definitional sense, now, does it? I like to define morphemic elements by saying they are "the smallest structural units of a word." (And if you're curious why I say morphemic elements and not morphemes, you'll have to reply and ask me).
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