7 Words We Rarely (or Never) Use Without Their Prefixes

The English language is full of terms that would be nowhere without their prefixes. You can be nonplussed, but can you be plussed? You can be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but what about being plain old whelmed? Here are the somewhat surprising answers to those and similar lexical mysteries.

Disgruntled

The dis- of disgruntle isn’t a negation—it’s just adding intensity to gruntle, a variant of grunt meaning “to grumble, murmur, complain.” Disgruntle entered the written record in the 17th century with the same definition we know today: “to put into sulky dissatisfaction or ill-humor.” Even back then, it was more common to use it as a modifier than as a verb; e.g. you’re probably more likely to say “I was disgruntled” than “He disgruntled me.”

You actually can be gruntled. The term, meaning “pleased, satisfied, contented,” was coined in the 20th century as a humorous antonym to disgruntled. It’s an example of back-formation—when you create a new word (or in this case, a new sense of an old word) by removing affixes rather than adding them to a root word.

Disturb

You can disturb someone, but you can’t turb them—because disturb never meant “to not turb.” The word was borrowed into Middle English from the Old French destorber, which came from the Latin disturbare. Like disgruntle, this dis- is functioning as an intensifier. Turbare is Latin for “to disorder or disturb,” so adding dis- basically makes it “to utterly disorder or disturb.” Though the English language didn’t adopt turbare directly, we do have terms that trace back to its root word, turba, meaning “turmoil or crowd.” Think turbid and turbulent. Even turb had a good run between the 14th and 17th centuries as another word for a crowd (or a clump of trees).

Innocent

Fourteenth-century English speakers borrowed innocent from the Old French inocent, which derives from the Latin innocens, meaning “not guilty, harmless.” That word breaks down into in-, “not,” and nocere, “to harm.” We borrowed nocent, too—meaning “guilty, harmful,” and also as a noun for a guilty person—either from the French nocent or directly from its Latin precursor nocens. But nocent showed up in English slightly later than innocent, and it often appeared alongside its opposite. “Taking away some Innocents with many Nocents,” one 1606 text said. In short, English speakers weren’t really using innocent to mean “not nocent”; it might be more apt to say they used nocent to mean “not innocent.”

Nonplussed

Nonplussed may be one of the English language’s most infamous misunderstood words. It technically means “perplexed or confounded,” but so many people (primarily in the U.S.) use it to mean “unfazed or unimpressed” that dictionaries now list that as a valid definition. The general theory is that people assumed it meant “not plussed,” with plussed being some long-forgotten synonym for ruffled or fazed. It may have been influenced by other non- words (nonchalant comes to mind).

But there never was a plussed. The origin story of nonplussed starts with non plus, Latin for “no more, no further.” That entered English during the 16th century as a noun, nonplus, describing “a state in which no more can be said or done; inability to proceed in speech or action; a state of perplexity or puzzlement,” per the Oxford English Dictionary. You might say you’re “at a nonplus” in the same way you’d say you’re “at a standstill.” It took barely any time for nonplus to become a verb—“to bring to a standstill; to perplex”—which is how we got nonplussed. It’s a prime example of an unpaired word: one which suggests a natural antonym that either never existed or is rarely used.

Overwhelm

If overwhelmed means you’re too whelmed and underwhelmed means you’re not whelmed enough, whelmed seems like the Goldilocksian ideal of emotional stasis. Unless you know what whelm originally meant: “to overturn or capsize,” from the Middle English whelmen. Overwhelm was just a more emphatic version of whelm, and both were eventually used to describe being overcome or engulfed by emotion. Merriam-Webster explains that “overwhelm has always been more popular, perhaps because the emphatic redundancy of overwhelm makes it seem more apt for describing reactions to powerful forces or feelings.”

Underwhelm basically has the same origin story as gruntled: People coined it in the 20th century as a tongue-in-cheek antonym of overwhelm. Unlike gruntled, underwhelm outlasted its function as a joke and became a pretty common word.

Repeat

You have to peat once before you can peat again, right? Sort of—but only in Latin. The word repeat has origins in repetere, Latin for “to do or say again; attack again.” Repetere combines re- (“again”) with petere, a versatile verb that could mean “to attack,” “to search for,” “to pursue,” “to procure,” and “to request,” among other definitions. While certain English words trace back to petere—petition, for one—the verb itself didn’t get an English equivalent in the same way repetere got repeat. (The origins of peat in the “soil-like material” sense are a mystery, but it doesn’t seem to be related to petere. A more likely theory is that it’s tied to the Latin petia, meaning “piece.”)

Unkempt

People were kempt, then they were well-kempt, and then finally they became unkempt. Kempt is an Old English word meaning “combed”; it’s the past participle of the verb kemb, “to comb.” Well-kempt—“having carefully combed hair,” though more broadly “of clean and tidy appearance”—first showed up in the written record in 1327 as a surname: “Simone Welekempd.”

Unkempt came along the following century and gained popularity during the 1500s. Early instances often refer to untidy hair or beards, but people quickly expanded the scope to cover all disheveled appearances. You could even use it to describe inelegant language. “Thy offers base I greatly loth, / And eke thy words uncourteous and unkempt,” a character says in Edmund Spenser’s 16th-century epic poem The Faerie Queene. Kempt alone has endured over the centuries, and the Oxford Dictionary has yet to label it obsolete. But the term definitely hasn’t thrived in the modern lexicon to the extent that unkempt has.

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