One Step Now Education

May 15, 2026

inherently

I was researching how students learn to comprehend what they are reading and the problem of coherence. The language of a passage can assist with a student's coherence, the ability to create a successful mental model of what's occurring in the text. Words that show relationships, like however or because, can be signposts of coherence.

Shortly afterward, I overhead the word inherently, and immediately I began wondering about the potential relationship between these two words.

Our investigation will trace how affixes like the suffix <-ent> and the suffix <-ly> transform how a word functions. We will learn more about adverbs. We'll learn about the element < in> and discuss what makes a morphological relatives. We'll review the four principal parts of Latin verbs and how we can use them to determine the English base of a word. Before we go, we'll look at frequentatives.

Meaning

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

When I'm investigating a word with a student, I want them to bring their own background to the table, if it exists. I know this word has something to do with something inside of you, so I might ask a student being introduced to this word, "Do you think there are some things you are naturally good at?" We may go off on a little discussion about an ability to sing or play football, but it can be a valid discussion for anchoring the meaning of this word.

I might then show them the word and explain that they might say someone has an inherent talent for painting. I might ask them to repeat the word to be sure they have down the pronunciation. Sometimes we will check a dictionary with student-friendly definitions, like the Collins. The entry there says something inherent are the "necessary and natural parts of it." We will then circle back to some of the other things we mention that we think some people are "naturally good at."

But then I want to get to how the word functions. The structure of the word shows me how the word inherently functions. So I might show them:

inherent
inherently

Let's continue this conversation in Structure, since we're headed that way.

Structure

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

The student then sees the difference in these two words is the <-ly> suffix. This means two things:

1. <-ly> is most likely an element in this word, since it can be removed.
2. <-ly> has a functional part to play in the "meaning" of this word.

The word "meaning" can be misleading. Meaning is not always lexical, not always a definition. Sometimes the meaning of a word is its grammar, its function, its use. An <-ly> suffix, as many of us may know, can be used to indicate adverbs. Adverbs are words that modify words that aren't nouns. In the Collins entry we have a sentence with the following phrase, inherently dangerous. Here the adverb is modifying the adjective dangerous.

I inherently know when my dog isn't feeling well.

In this sentence, inherently is modifying the verb know. How do you know? inherently

An adverb can also modify another adverb.

But now I've gone and intertwined the meaning and structure questions! But see, these four questions aren't inherently discrete.

I'm also thinking that the inherent is an adjective, as in the phrase "inherentgoodness." A suffix <-ent> can form adjectives, like different and excellent.

And just like with last week's investigation of incarcerated, I might be able to remove that inherent, then it is "inside" us, no?

Let's pause to talk about why I refer to that Affixes, or prefixes and suffixes, are bound elements. This means they cannot exist as an element on their own; they must be attached to some other element to be considered a "word." Bases can also be bound, as the base produce. That base cannot exist as a word on its own.

The inside. It could also be considered a base in last week's word incarcerated. Could it be a base in inherently or is it like the inactive or incoherent?

Let's see if Etymonline can help us.

The entry for inherent confirms that it is the element

The root of this word is the Latin verb haerere, "adhere; stick." The ae is actually the ash, a grapheme that looks like an and an

Relatives

What are the word's relatives and history?

We now have inherent, and possibly coherence and adhere. To verify those are relatives, I'd have to see if they also share the root of haerere. They do. Then to be morphological relatives which we can put in a matrix, they must have the same base:

co + here + ence
ad + here

They are all relatives that can be in the same matrix. I can plug the Latin root back into the search engine of Etymonline to see if I can find other relatives.

We see cohesion and cohesive among these entries. Although they share the same root, they do not share the same base:

co + hese + ion
co + hese + ive

Therefore, they cannot go in a matrix with our words. This base comes from the fourth principal part of that Latin verb haerere. We can find the four principal parts of a Latin verb in a tool like Lat-Dict.

haero, haerere, haesi, haesus

When we remove the Latin suffix <-us> from the fourth principal part, we get

We also have another etymological relative that I think will be familiar to all of you...hesitation. The verb haerere had a frequentative form in Latin, haesitare. Frequentative forms are verbs in which there is a repeated action. You will see them come up here and there, but not often enough that I'd consider them a Big Idea in English orthography. However, when you think about the orthographic denotation our words all hold of "sticking" or "adhering," then to "frequently" do that would be "to get stuck," which has a great correlation to our modern hesitate.

Graphemes

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

Now I don't get hung up on grapheme-phoneme correspondences as some others do. I think there is a time and place for that type of instruction, and by the time you're looking at polysyllabic words like inherently, you're "beyond" analyzing words according to their grapheme-phoneme correspondences. I'm more interested in having students notice common bases, like in inherently, coherent, and adhere and noting they are always spelled the same across the family.

Therefore, if you ask me if the inherently and coherent than it is in adhere. Yet it stays consistent in its spelling.

See the English orthographic system is not crazy but coherent after all.

Next Steps

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

So this time my hunch was right about the relationship between inherently and coherence. With just a little investigating we discovered a small but interesting family. You could say the connection was inherently there all along, waiting to be noticed.

Stay curious,

Brad

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PS. This will be the last week to register for this cohort of the course I teach with Dr. Jennifer Petrich, Connecting the D.O.T.S: Integrating Scientific Word Study into Your Practice. In that course, you'll see how Jen and I work with students. We will talk about how to plan lessons, the strategies we use when teaching students, and the common misconceptions we work to help students overcome. You can register here.

PPS. Earlier we talked about prefixes and suffixes being bound to other elements. They don't carry much "lexical weight." This simply means they lend whatever lexical "meaning" they can be said to have to the base they're attached to. Prefixes tend to have more semantic meaning, usually directional; whereas suffixes tend to lend more grammatical meaning.