MUR meaning "wall," has produced a modest number of English words.

POLIS/POLIT comes from the Greek word for "city." The ancient Greek city-states, such as Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, operated much like separate nations, so all their politics was local, like all their public policy--and even all their police!

NUMER comes from the Latin words meaning "number" and "to count." A numeral is the symbol that represents a number. Numerous means "many," and innumerable means "countless." Numerical superiority is superiority in numbers, and your numerical standing in a class is a ranking expressed as a number.

KILO is the French version of the Greek word chilioi, meaning "thousand." France is also where the metric system originated, in the years following the French Revolution. So in English, kilo- shows up chiefly in metric-system units. Before the computer age, the nost familiar kilo- words for English-speakers were probably kilowatt, meaning "1,000 watts," and kilowatt-hour, meaning the amount of energy equal to one kilowatt over the course of an hour.

MICRO from the Greek mikros, meaning "small," is a popular English prefix. A microscope lets the eye see microscopic objects, and libraries store the pages of old newspapers on microfilm at 1/400th of their original size. And we continue to attach micro- to lots of familiar words; most of us could figure out the meaning of microbus and microquake without ever having heard them before. Scientists often use micro- to mean "millionth"; thus, a microsecond is a millionth of a second, and a micrometer is a millionth of a meter.

MULTI comes from the Latin word multus, meaning "many." Thus, a multicultural society is one that includes people of several different countries, languages, and religions; a multimedia artwork uses two or more artistic media (dance, music, film, spoken text, etc.); and a multitude of complaints reaching your office would be a great many indeed.

PAR from the Latin, means "equal." Our English word par means an amount taken as an average or a standard, and especially the standard score for each hole on a golf course--which is why the parse "par for the course" means "about as well as expected." We compare things to see if they\'re equal; similar things can be called comparable--that is, "equal with." And "on a par with" means "comparable to."

PHOB comes from the Greek noun phobos, "fear," and it shows up clearly in our noun phobia, meaning "unusual fear of a specific thing." Phobias vary greatly in seriousess and also in frequency. Most of us have experienced claustrophobia at some time, but few truly suffer from fear of the number 13, a condition known as triskaidekaphobia.

Medical Words

HEM/HEMO comes from the Greek word for "blood" and is found at the beginning of many medical terms. By dropping the h-, the same word produced the suffix -emia, which likewise shows up in lots of "blood" words, including anemia, leukemia and hyperglycemia.

ITIS a suffix found in both Greek and Latin, means "disease" or "inflammation." In appendicitis your appendix is swollen and painful, and in tonsillitis the same is true of your tonsils. With laryngitis, your throat and larynx may become so sore that it\'s difficult to talk. Some of us enjoy making up our own -itis words; high-school teachers, for example, long ago noticed that many of their seniors tended to lose all interest in schoolwork and start skipping classes, and labeled the condition senioritis.