Chrono

The young creatures wanted to know how they were supposed to find Chrono, since it didn't always announce itself at the front of a word.

"That's the Advanced lesson," Chrono said. "A beginner looks for a morpheme only at the front, like a doorbell. But I ride wherever the word needs me. In chronic I'm at the front — an illness that lasts a long time. In chronicle I'm at the front — a record kept over time. But in synchronize I'm buried in the middle — syn-chron-ize — and in anachronism I'm deep inside too — ana-chron-ism. A morpheme is not defined by where it sits. It's defined by the meaning it carries. Learn to hear chron anywhere in a word, front or middle, and you'll never miss me."

The creatures practised hunting for chron in the middle of words, and every time they found it, the word turned out to be about time.

Then Chrono taught them about its own family and its own spelling, because Advanced readers can handle a little Greek.

"I come from an old Greek word for time," it said. "That's why I usually wear an h after the c — chron, not cron. Most of my family keeps that spelling: chronology, chronometer (a very precise clock), chronicle, synchronous. Knowing I'm Greek tells you something useful — I like to keep company with other Greek parts. -logy (study), -meter (measure), syn- (together). So chronology is the study of time-order, and chronometer is a time-measurer. When you spot one Greek part, look for its Greek friends nearby — they travel in packs."

Chrono made an honest note about a trap, because it was old enough to have fallen into it.

"Not every cron is me," it warned. "There is a word crony — an old pal — that has nothing to do with time, and it doesn't even keep my h. And a crone is an old woman, from a completely different root. Looking a little like me is not the same as being me. The proof is always the meaning: if the word is genuinely about time, and the piece is spelled chron, that's me. If the word has nothing to do with time, it's a stranger who happens to share a few letters. Check the meaning, not just the letters." It ticked, slow and certain. "A morpheme is a sound-and-meaning pair, not just a spelling."