fer

Two senses that English split apart

Ferre meant both to carry something and to bear a weight, and English inherited both. Transfer, refer, prefer, differ and confer are all about moving something from one place to another. Suffer is about what a person bears: the word is sub- + ferre, "to carry from below", which is exactly the physical image of a load on someone's back. Offer is the same verb with ob-, "carry toward", and the b disappeared in French.

There is a third sense that looks unrelated and is worth noticing once: fertile is from fertilis, "bearing abundantly", built on the same verb stem with a different suffix. Once fertile is in the family, so are fecund's Latin relatives and the whole vocabulary of bearing fruit.

The lat- half of the family

Because Latin's irregular participle for ferre was latus, a large group of English words carries this root in the lat- shape. Translate carries meaning across languages; relate carries it back; collate carries texts together for comparison; ablation is the carrying away of material, in surgery and in glaciology alike.

This is the practical reason the entry exists. When a word with -late in it seems to have no etymology at all, the answer is usually ferre. The vowel is different and the consonant is gone, but the sense of something being moved is the same one that gives transfer its meaning.

• translate — trans- + latus, carried across from one language to another
• relate — re- + latus, carried back, hence a narrative that carries one thing back to another
• collate — com- + latus, carried together for comparison
• ablate / ablation — ab- + latus, carried away, hence surgical removal or the melting of a glacier
• elate — e- + latus, carried out of oneself, originally a word for being lifted up
• superlative — super- + latus, carried above everything else

Reading the prefix

The prefixes in this family behave consistently and are a fast way into academic vocabulary. Trans- across, re- back, pre- before, dif- apart, con- together, sub- from below, ob- toward, in- in. Add the ending -ence or -ance and you have the noun: transference, reference, preference, difference, conference, inference.

One warning: Latin had several verbs with ferre's shape that belong to other roots — ferrum (iron) gives ferrous and ferric; ferus (wild) gives feral; and some -fer words are native English coinages such as transferable and untransferable. Match a new word to the family by its prefix, not just by its letters.