The roots of ‚roots‘

Roots, Wurzeln and rādīcēs all go back to the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root: *u̯r(e)h₂d- (or something like that). English root is borrowed from Scandinavian. In Old Icelandic it was spelled rót, in Modern Swedish, for example, rot (pronounced like English root). Because the initial consonant cluster of PIE *u̯r- was hard to pronounce, *u̯- (PIE spelling convention for w) was dropped, Read on…