Questioning the obvious

Every so often, I ponder upon words I have used ever since I was a child and realize I learnt the words, but never really understood their connection or meaning. While I have come across several such realizations, I have noted down only a few. Time to start changing that!

English borrows copiously from Latin and hence shares with Sanskrit to a large degree the scientific structure of forming new words from base words. This *creates* to an interesting relationships between new words, allowing the language to *grow* organically.

Words in focus today: crest

Crest as we all probably already learnt means the peak of a summit or maximum point of a wave (as opposed to trough). From "crest" comes the word "cresent" (or the Latin equivelent "créscere")meaning "growing" or in other words something that is "growing towards a peak or a crest".

From crest, also comes the word "crease", which typically means a groove or wrinkle. Essentially, a feature with sharp peak.

From "crease" come the more familiar words, "in-crease" and "de-crease" meaning to "induce a crest" or "reduce a crest" (notice "induce" and "reduce" and the root "duce" and the latin origin "ducere" but we'll come around to that another time).

Also related to the Latin "crescere" is "creare" meaning "to make" or "to produce", which gives us the word "create" meaning "to make something" or "to grow something".

"Create" also gives us the following words:
"creature" meaning "something made" or "something grown" or "something that was created" (stemming perhaps from God's creature).
"creation"

From "créscere" ("growing") comes the "creistre" ("to grow") which leads to the past-participle "creu" ("grew"). From "creu" comes the familiar verb "accrue" meaning "grow by collecting" (or very surrealy,"grow by growing").

"crue" also produces (notice root "duce" again) the familiar word "crew" meaning "(a collection of things that were) grown". From "crew" comes the notion of "re-crue" ("re-crew" or "regrow") (notice how a noun gradually evolves in to a verb, akin to the usage of "Google") and the familiar though seemingly unrelated verb/ noun "recruit"!