ora

The root ora comes from Greek horama, meaning "a thing seen, a view, a sight," which is built on the verb horan, "to see." In English the root is rare and survives almost entirely inside one word and its adjective: panorama and panoramic. The magic happens when you add the prefix pan- (all): pan- + horama = panorama, literally "all that can be seen" — a complete, all-encompassing view. The word was actually coined fairly recently, in the 1790s, by the Irish painter Robert Barker, who built huge circular paintings that surrounded the viewer so that you could turn in a full circle and see an entire landscape. He needed a name for this new kind of all-around picture, so he reached into Greek and assembled pan- + orama. From that single invented word the root spread no further than its own family: panorama (the noun) and panoramic (the adjective, as in a panoramic view or a panoramic camera). What makes ora worth knowing is not its productivity but its precise flavor: it is not just "sight" but sweeping, total sight — the view that takes in everything at once. When you read panoramic, picture standing on a mountaintop and slowly turning all the way around: nothing is hidden, the whole scene is laid out before you. That feeling of an unbroken, comprehensive view is exactly what the Greek horama carried. Be careful not to over-extend this root: many English words that contain the letters o-r-a have nothing to do with seeing (oral, oracle, and inexorable all come from Latin orare, "to speak/pray," a completely different source). The ora-as-sight root really only lives inside the panorama family.