dit

The root dit comes from Latin dare, "to give." It is one of the oldest and most basic verbs in any language — before money, before writing, people gave. Latin's past participle was datus ("given"), and from that single idea English inherited a surprisingly wide family, spelled dat-, dit-, don-, dot-, dos-.

Start with the most literal sense: a thing given. A Roman letter would begin data Romae — "given at Rome," i.e. handed to the courier on such-and-such a day. That opening word data drifted into meaning the day itself — our date. The same "given" idea sits inside data (facts that are given to you to work with) and datum (a single given fact). When you update something, you bring its "given" information up to the present.

Add a prefix and the giving gets a direction:
- e- (out) + dare → edit: to give out a text to the public — what an editor does. From it: edition, editor, editorial.
- ad- (to) + dare → addition: something given to a total — added.
- re- (back) + dare → render, rendition: to give back, hand over, or deliver (a performance, a translation, even a prisoner).
- trans- (across) + dare → tradition: knowledge handed across the generations. A tradition is literally something given over from the old to the young.

A second spelling, don-, comes from the related Latin donare ("to give as a gift"):
- donate, donation, donor — to give freely, the giver.
- per- (thoroughly) + donare → pardon: to give completely — to wipe a debt or crime clean by giving total forgiveness.
- con- (fully) + donare → condone: again "to give fully," hence to overlook or tolerate a wrong.

Finally, the Greek cousin didonai ("to give") feeds the dot/dos branch:
- anti- (against) + didonai → antidote: something given against a poison.
- an- + ek- (not + out) + didonai → anecdote: something not given out — originally unpublished private stories, now any short tale.
- a dose is literally "a giving" — a measured amount given to a patient; hence dosage, overdose.

So across Latin and Greek, every dit-word circles one act: something passes from one hand to another. Track who gives what to whom, and the whole family lines up.