Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
So you may consider an
in + dustry
But then is the base
in + dust + ry
Certainly that jewelry or chemistry. But is that what's going on in this word?
This is where we can run into trouble. Looks can be deceiving. Just because it looks like a potential prefix or suffix doesn't mean it is one. Unfortunately, I've run into numerous word sums and matrices across social media where the maker hasn't done their due diligence and checked an etymological dictionary to attest the elements of the word.
We like checking the Online Etymology Dictionary first. We affectionately refer to it as Etymonline.
When I go to the entry for industry there, I see this word entered the English lexicon in the late 15th century. This is the beginning of the Modern English era. Linguists have divided the history of our language into three eras: Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. They didn't do this so that Brad could quiz you each week on what era of English a word is from. They do this to mark the significant milestones that altered the language. These milestones, or changes in the lexicon and grammar, meant that a speaker of one era is highly unlikely to understand the speaker of another era.
The early Modern English period coincided with the career of Shakespeare. When you covered Shakespeare in high school, you may have considered it to be a rough go, but consider Beowulf, a text from Old English, or Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a text from Middle English, and you begin to see how the low intelligibility plays more of a factor than our distance from Shakespeare. Perhaps linguists of the future, however, will see fit to mark the 21st century as yet another dividing line.
Back to our word industry.
We can trace the line back to Old French "or directly from Latin." When you see that "or" in an Etymonline entry it suggests that the direct etymon is unclear. Either way, I continue to follow the froms until I reach the final attested form. Here I see the Latin indostruus. The entry does go on to say it is from indu + stem of struere.
Does that Latin verb struere look familiar to you?
If you have studied words like instruction or constructive with your students, then you have come across this verb with a sense of "build" before.
But what does that entry mean by the stem?
The stem is an element of a word that can be affixed. Unlike a base, it can be reduced further.
For example, we have the base joy.
To that base, I can add <-ful> and have joyful. I can also add the prefix enjoy.
Then enjoy becomes a stem, to which I can add other suffixes to create enjoyable or enjoyment.
The stem enjoy can be further analyzed; whereas the base
In Latin, stems work somewhat similarly. The stem of struere is stru to which they've added the infinitive suffix <-ere>.
Many of the words in this family come from the fourth principal part. Latin verbs have four principal parts. The second and fourth principal parts give us our English bases.
We can navigate to a tool like Lat-Dict to find all four principal parts:
struo, struere, struxi, structus
You can see the stem in all of those parts with various suffixes appended.
From the fourth principal part, we get the English base instructor, construction, and indestructible.
And from the second principal part, after removing the infinitive suffix, we get the English base
indu + stry
Often when Latin came into French, the French phonological system adapted the word to fits its own language. Then time passed and as French evolved, so evolved the pronunciation and sometimes the orthography of the word as well. Finally, it arrives on our shores "Frenchified."
