2. common (rarely used by itself, but this idea dominates the related words)
Meanings
Examples
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My Articles
"gemein" means "mean" in the sense of "bad". But lots of words with "gemein" in them are about community. Today, we'll find out why.
Vocab:
gemein, die Gemeinheit, gemeinsam, die Gemeinde, die Gemeinschaft, allgemein, im Allgemeinen
Word Family
Root: *mei-
The core idea of this root was:
change, go from one to another
One branch of the tree focused on the idea of “things shared by all”. Like… tools being passed around in the community for example. That’s the branch around common, community. communication and communism and also the Germanic gemein and mean (read my article for details).
But there are more offspring, so here’s a little overview:
- migrate, emigrate (“moving from place to place”)
- municipal (originally “services in the community”)
- immune (originally “not rendering services”)
- mutate, mutation (“change”)
- mutual (“in exchange”)
- mis-, mistake, mishear (originally “in a changed way”)
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