The < blood > Family

Zac and I are reading Charlotte's Web by E.B. White as his chapter book in the evenings (our complete list of bedtime stories so far is here), and I was particularly struck by the word < bloodthirsty > in Chapter 5, "Charlotte."

It got me to thinking about what words are in the < blood > family. When Zac was little, he said "I'm blood-ing" to me, which is a common word construction for "bleeding" when children are small. Here's where we began:

blood + thirst + y

blood + y

blood + pudding

Then Zac thought up another one! He was very proud of

blood + orange

When we look at < blood orange >, an open compound word, we see a spelling connection AND a meaning connection. The flesh of the fruit is red!

The family of < blood > is an interesting, and less common, one to study and it allows you to talk about < blooding > and why children make the common mistake that it's a word. You also can use it to teach the three types of compounds. For a foil, I chose < band-aid >, a hyphenated compound word. There is a clear meaning connection! The spelling connection is interesting; < band-aid > starts with a < b > and ends with a < d >, so if children are just looking for a few matching letters, they may argue that it is in the family. In fact, only a word that has a shared BASE is a morphological relative (as proven by the word sum process).

When I looked up < blood > in etymonline, by the way, I found lots of other words in this family! Bloodtype, bloodbank, bloodletting, blueblood, pureblood, halfblood, bloodstream, bloodcurdling, bloodroot, bloodsucker, bloodhound, lifeblood, cold-blooded, hot-blooded, and more!

And the fate of < bleeding > ? A word that has a shared ROOT is an etymological relative, and we would tell children that those words are cousins, but when I look in etymonline at < blood > and < bleed >, they don't go back to the same Old English root. They can be traced to the same hypothetical PIE source, *bhel- (3), however. So I would say to a child, hmmmm, I wonder.

A question that you don't know the answer to is just evidence that a word has an interesting story!

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