*ster(ə)-

The core idea of this root was:

expanding, strewing, dispersing

The more obvious members are to strew and straw and maybe also for stray, but the root is also the origin of the Latin branch around struct, which means it’s the origin of words like structure, construct, obstruct, instruct and destroy and destruction. The connection here is the notion of building a heap of something. Not super intuitive but when you think of a heap of straw it maybe makes sense.

Other family members are street (“what stretches”), strategy (“armies spread out”) and stratosphere (“the spread out sphere”)