lat

The root lat is a chameleon. It hides inside dozens of everyday words, yet it never looks like a 'real' root the way port or scrib do. The reason is that lat is not a verb stem at all in the usual sense — it is a leftover.

Latin had the verb ferre, 'to bear, to carry.' But ferre was wildly irregular. Its present tense gave us the root fer (transfer, refer, prefer). Its past participle, however, came from a completely different stem: lātus, 'carried, brought.' This is called suppletion — like how English 'go' has the past 'went' from a totally unrelated word. So fer and lat are two halves of one verb: fer = 'carry,' lat = 'having been carried.'

Because lātus already meant 'brought / carried,' Latin used it to build a family of words by adding prefixes that tell you WHERE something was carried:

- re- (back) + lātus → relate: things carried back to each other, i.e. connected. To relate a story is to carry it back to a listener.
- trans- (across) + lātus → translate: meaning carried across from one language to another.
- cor- (together) + lātus → correlate: two things carried alongside each other, moving together.
- super- (above) + lātus → superlative: a quality carried above all others — the highest degree.
- e-/ex- (up, out) + lātus → elation: a spirit carried upward, lifted into joy.
- ob- (toward) + lātus → oblation: something carried up and offered to a god.
- di- (apart) + lātus → dilatory: carrying a matter apart in time, i.e. dragging it out, delaying.

One special case: legislate / legislature. Here lat joins lex/legis ('law'): to 'bring forward a law.' This is the lex family, not legere ('read'), even though the spelling overlaps.

The pattern to remember: wherever you see -late or -lat- and the meaning involves carrying, bringing, or moving something somewhere, you are looking at the past participle of ferre. The prefix supplies the direction; lat supplies the carrying.