put

The root put comes from Latin putāre, and its story is a small lesson in how a hands-on word becomes a word about the mind.

The oldest, most literal sense of putāre was to prune — to cut back a vine or tree, trimming away the dead wood so the plant grows clean and clear. From there the meaning made a natural jump: just as a gardener clears a tangled plant, a person can clear a tangled set of facts. So putāre came to mean to reckon, to settle accounts, to think something through — to mentally 'prune' a problem until the answer stands out clearly.

This 'reckoning' sense is the one that powers almost the whole English family, working through prefixes:

- com- (together) + putāre → compute: reckon all the numbers together — to calculate. The machine that does this became the computer.
- dis- (apart) + putāre → dispute: when two people reckon apart — each working the problem to a different answer — they argue.
- re- (again, repeatedly) + putāre → repute / reputation: what people reckon again and again about you — your standing, your name.
- im- (in, onto) + putāre → impute: to reckon onto someone's account — to charge a fault or motive to them.
- de- (away, off) + putāre → depute / deputy: literally to 'cut off' a task and assign it — one person reckoned in place of another, a delegate.
- putative (thought to be) keeps the bare 'supposed, reckoned' sense: the putative father is the one assumed to be the father.

Then one member loops all the way back to the original meaning. amputate = amb- (around) + putāre in its pruning sense = to 'cut around' — to prune a limb off the body. The surgeon does to a leg what the gardener does to a branch.

The pattern to hold onto: put is about clearing things up — first with a blade (pruning), then in the head (reckoning). Almost every word is some flavor of 'working a thing out': calculating, arguing, judging someone's worth, assigning blame. The one outlier, amputate, simply went back to the knife.