Word building

Let’s look at how you can understand the meaning of many words by de-constructing them into simple elements that you already know. Composing, decomposing and recomposing words can give you more ressources to express your ideas.

1. Look at these phrases :
   “Good recommendations on social media can look objective, but in fact a lot of them are misleading because they are sponsorized by advertizing”.
   “He wants me to join his discussion group online by telling me that I can make more friends this way, but I think he just tries to mislead me and give himself more followers.
   

Do you understand how the word “mislead” is formed and what it means?

“MIS” means “wrong”, and “LEAD” means to “make someone follow you”, so “mislead” means to “take someone into the wrong direction”. When you say that information is misleading, it’s an indirect way of saying that it is not exactly true and can give you wrong ideas

2. You can put “-LESS” after a noun (an object, or an idea) to create an adjective (a characteristic) to show the absence of this characteristic.

Example that you probably already know : When you think that an object has no practical value, you can say that it’s useless.

Now let’s practice creating new words with “-less”:

How can you call someone who wears very clothes that don’t match and look horrible together? (If you want to show that the person doesn’t have any taste?

You can say that his style of clothes is tasteless.

How can you call someone who is not polite, and who makes rude comments about people (You want to show that this person doesn’t have any manners or tact)

You can say that the person is tactless.

Well, the previous examples were quite easy because I gave you the actual word to put “-less” after it, but in the next phrases, you will need to search the right word a little more. If you don’t know, you can click on the triangle directly and get to the right answer. It doesn’t matter if you have made up (=invented) a few new words that don’t exist. It just stimulates your creativity!

When someone says or does something really shocking, how can you say that you don’t have any words to describe how it made you feel?

You can say that this shocking phrase or act has left you speechless.

How can you describe someone who just doesn’t understand anything you tell them?

You can say that the person doesn’t have any idea what you are talking about, or that they don’t have a clue what you are saying. So, this person is clueless.

To finish with “-less”, if you talk about an obvious (=evident) fact that everyone can see, you can say:
“Needless to say, everyone sometimes dreams of creating a great idea that will make them famous…
It’s the same as “It goes without saying that everyone sometimes…”