One Step Now Education

August 23, 2024

empowerment

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These word investigations started as a way to hold myself accountable for learning more about the English orthographic system. As an administrator, I didn’t have a daily teaching practice with students, so my knowledge was stuck on the things I was discovering in my reading and classes alone. That wasn’t enough.

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I had been investigating words on my own off and on over my first years with this work. I read that “building in public” (i.e. social media) could be a way to hold yourself accountable. After posting my first few word investigations, I found people were not only reading them, but learning from them as well. So now I’ve added a new reason for these weekly investigations.

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empowerment

Meaning

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

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Words have power. They’ve changed my life. I have learned all about the world through reading and writing. In my youth, my mother would take us to the library, and I was over the moon the day I learned the limit of four was just for new sign-ups. After that, I left with stack after stack. Still do.

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When we empower someone, we “give a person or group power or status in a particular situation,” states the entry for empowerment in the Collins dictionary, my favorite resource for student-friendly definitions.

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This word functions as an “uncountable” noun. This means, that unlike many nouns, we do not pluralize this word. I remember the day I learned that “pluralizing” doesn’t occur when there is “more than one,” but instead “not one.” After all, we have zero apples and no cares in the world. That’s empowering.

Structure

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

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I’ve affixed the word empower several times in the first section. We can be empowered. I find knowledge empowering. Therefore, we can conclude that the <ment> is a suffix added on to the stem empower.

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empower + ment

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However, you may also recognize the word power inside that stem. A stem can be analyzed into more than one element. A hypothesis might be:

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em + power + ment

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Now, I’ve often been fooled before by thinking I know a word’s elements, but looks can be deceiving. After all, is the <er> on power a suffix?

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To get further evidence on the elements in this word, it would be really empowering to have a dictionary of all the “morphemes” in the world. However, such a dictionary would be really unwieldy, and much of the power in scientifically studying words like this comes from the actual investigation and inquiry itself.

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The Etymonline entry for empowerment links us to the entry for empower. At that entry we see that this word is made of two elements. The first element is <em->, which is an “assimilated form” of <en->. Many Latinate prefixes ending in <n> will assimilate into a form with <m> before a <p> or <b>, as in con/com/compare or in/im/important.

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What about power? Can it be analyzed further? This word can be traced all the way back to the Latin adjective potis, meaning “powerful.” Its journey through French contained some phonological changes, which we sometimes refer to as Frenchifying.

Relatives

What are the word’s relatives and history?

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potis > OF podir > OF povoir > AF. pouair > ME. pouer > PDE. power

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We can see that the <-er> is not a suffix in this word but part of its evolution in the language. Words in our lexicon that share the root as well as the base <power> include powerful, powerfully, powerless, and powerlessness. We have compounds like overpower, horsepower, and powerboat.

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If we wanted to add etymological relatives inside a circle surrounding the matrix, we might start with potent and potential. We could even include omnipotent and impotent. We even have posse and possess. Can you see how those words share a thread with the orthographic denotation of “powerful?”

Graphemes

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

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When you were younger, were you taught about “short” and “long” <e>? I was, even though there was nothing really short or long about them; they were completely different. Regardless, when I think about that first letter in empowerment, it’s really more like a “short” <i>. If I “sounded this out” to spell, I might spell it with an <i>. I mean, it makes sense when you think of words like impact and impair. Nevertheless, the journey through French tells me that the French form is in play here, <em->.

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There’s also the vowel digraph <ow> here. That digraph may be read as /aʊ/ or /oʊ/. The phoneme /aʊ/ may be spelled <ou> or <ow>. Which one to use? I was told that <ow> comes at the end of words or before an <l> or <n> as in growl or crown. But that’s not happening here. Hmmm…

Next Steps

Where do I go next?

What other “uncountable” nouns can you and your students find? How else do we know they are nouns?

The suffix <–ment> might be a good study. How does this suffix help words to function?

Why do we use an <ow> instead of an <ou>, especially in words like towel and cower? Gather up words with this vowel digraph and see what patterns you and your students notice.

I enjoy knowing that these weekly word investigations have empowered some of you in your own studies. I enjoy reading about them in the comments. Let me know what you have learned or how they have inspired you.

Stay curious,

Brad

One Step Now Education

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