One Step Now Education

June 26, 2026

emulate

As with many words, I spotted the word emulate in something I was reading and started wondering, "What is the base in this word?" This is the kind of curiosity about words and their structures I'm trying to get my students to emulate. Get it?

In this investigation, we'll learn more about verbs and sentence frames we can use to test for them. We will also look at the derivational suffix <-ate>. We'll review what a back-formation is as we learn to follow the froms to help us understand an Etymonline entry.

Meaning

What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?

When I say I want my students to emulate my curiosity about words, I say I want them to mimic or imitate. The entry in the Collins dictionary says "you imitate them because you admire them a great deal."

Our word functions as a verb. Many of my students come to me telling me a verb is an "action word." Of course, we know they run into trouble soon when encountering verbs like is or thinks. These verbs aren't exactly actions. I find it more helpful to think of verbs by testing them in the following frame:

They WORD today. They WORD yesterday.

Substitute your word accordingly.

They emulate today. They emulated yesterday.

Verbs have a present tense that we see in the first sentence and a past tense that we see in the second sentence. Most verbs form past tense by adding the suffix <-ed>. Others change by shifting the vowel:

They run today. They ran yesterday.

These are known as strong verbs. Some strong verbs are becoming "weak verbs." Where we once said dreamt, we now say dreamed. This has happened to many previously strong verbs over time.

Try to put a noun in those sentences.

They apple today. They appled yesterday.

Doesn't work. Not a noun. What about:

They purple today. They purpled yesterday.

Purple is an adjective.

Of course, words can be both nouns and verbs.

It rains today. It rained yesterday.

In these sentences, rain is a verb.

The rains fell on Kapiti Plain.

In this sentence, rain is a noun. I can tell, because only nouns can be made plural. Notice that the plural noun ending <-s> and the third person singular ending <-s> on "It rains" looks the same.

Structure

What are the elements that make up this word's structure?

We have a suffix here that can derive verbs, <-ate>:

emul + ate

That suffix is versatile. It creates verbs on words like populate and vacate, but it can also form adjectives like considerate and accurate. And some words can be both, like graduate and separate. We can even have nouns that end with <-ate>, like primate and senate.

But after looking at my hypothesis above, I started wondering, "Could the

e + mule/ + ate

When a single allomorph of emerge and evaporate.

When the word has been stripped of its affixes, so to speak, I'll then ask the student, "Which element here is the base?" After all, every word is or has a base.

I doubt the base

In Etymonline, the entry states that our word may be a back-formation of emulation. This means that emulation came before emulate. This also happened with words like editor which entered the language before the word edit.

When we follow the entry for emulation, we begin following the froms. In this strategy, my student will circle all the froms in the entry and then we list the roots and languages backwards until we get to the final attested root.

F. emulation
L. aemulationem
L. aemulari
L. aemulus

You'll notice that the last two froms say they are from Proto-Italic and PIE, or Proto-Indo-European. They also have an asterisk in front of them. This is to show you that these are unattested forms, meaning they have been reconstructed by linguists; we have no proof in print. Therefore, we cannot use those to surmise a word's orthography.

The Latin aemulus, "striving," makes sense semantically when I think of someone emulating someone, they are "striving" to be or do it like that person. This original sense from the root is known as the orthographic denotation. Vestiges of the orthographic denotation will show in all members of the family, even if the meaning does drift over time.

With an adjective or noun in Latin, we can remove the Latin suffix <-us> to arrive at our English base,

Turns out that the emulate was once a ligature made of and

emule + ate

Relatives

What are the word's relatives and history?

So what other words might be related to emulate and a base of emulate as a verb would have all of the other members of its verbal paradigm, emulated and emulating. As well, we have the noun emulation. We also have an adjective, emulous.

Now, even though we cannot use PIE to attest orthography, we can use it to show relationships that are etymological. In Latin, we also have imitate and imagine and all of their forms.

Graphemes

What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?

In Latin, the ligature

In addition, look at how we pronounce the suffix <-ate> in this word. In many verbs, we pronounce this suffix with the same vowel sound in FACE, /eɪt/. However, when we have the adjectival <-ate> it is often pronounced with the schwa /ət/. We see this very clearly with words that have both forms like the verb and adjective graduate or the verb and adjective separate.

Next Steps

What concepts from this investigation can we explore next to learn more about the English orthographic system?

What I hope my students will learn is not just the right answers or the correct way to form a word sum. I want them to emulate curiosity, the slow noticing, the testing of ideas, the willingness to be wrong, and to keep digging anyway. Word investigations like this don’t just teach us about a single word; they show students what it looks like to stay curious. And that’s a habit worth emulating.

Stay curious,

Brad

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PS. I have a handy little sort for the suffix <-ate> you could use as a resource with your students if you are a member of Creating English Orthographers (CEO), my community for practitioners of scientific word study. Subscribe today.

PPS. Another test for verbs is that they can be negated. We can say, "Don't run in the hallway!" or "Don't emulate him!" We can't do the same with other word classes.

Taking the Next Step (formerly Into Practice)

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Welcome to Taking the Next Step, a monthly addendum to the WIN that gives a little window in how to teach scientific word study.

Let's extend the next step for the suffix <-ate> a little further. How would I plan a lesson on that topic for my beginning learners?

First I would begin by determining if the learning was appropriate (AHA! See what I did there?) for the learner(s). Big Idea #4 states, "Words are composed of elements such as bases, prefixes, suffixes and connecting vowel letters." and <-ate> is certainly a common suffix students start encountering frequently in text beginning in about third grade.

If my learner and I had not dealt with bound bases yet, I might start off with a word like fortunate, where I could remove the <-ate> and still have a stem, fortune. Unfortunately (HA! I did it again), there aren't a lot of those words.

I'd write fortune and fortunate on the board and ask my student how the addition of <-ate> changed the word. How do they change how we use them in a sentence?

That may lead us into looking at how the suffix <-ate> changes the word grammatically.

Some common words beginning student might be familiar with include nouns like certificate, climate and candidate. We could look at verbs like graduate, animate, or estimate, a word very familiar to them from math class. For adjectives, there are many like considerate, accurate, immediate, separate, and private.

We can also sort those by pronunciation to discover an interesting pattern among word class and pronunciation of the suffix <-ate>.

When planning lessons for beginning students, I often think of words where the removal of the suffix leaves us with a known stem. I'll teach nervous with the base