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o-grade

o-grade noun: in Proto-Indo-European linguistics, an ablaut form of a Proto-Indo-European root, characterised by the presence of the */o/ vowel phoneme in place of */e/.

Noun

o-grade (uncountable)

  1. (Indo-European-studies) In Proto-Indo-European linguistics, an ablaut form of a Proto-Indo-European root, characterised by the presence of the */o/ vowel phoneme in place of */e/.
    • Ancient Greek γόνος (gónos) is a reflex of *ǵónh₁os (“race”), which is itself an o-grade derivative of the root *ǵenh₁- (“to beget; to produce, bear”).
    • A considerable number of derived nominals, especially thematic nouns, also exhibited o-grade roots.2006, Donald Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (A Linguistic History of English; 1), Oxford: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 12

Questions about o-grade

What does o-grade mean?
O-grade means in Proto-Indo-European linguistics, an ablaut form of a Proto-Indo-European root, characterised by the presence of the */o/ vowel phoneme in place of */e/.
What part of speech is o-grade?
O-grade is a noun.

Words near o-grade in the dictionary

  1. o-dark-thirty
  2. o-face
  3. o-faces
  4. o-fer
  5. o-fers
  6. o-grade
  7. O-Kung
  8. O-level
  9. O-levels
  10. O-lock
  11. O-locks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: o-grade (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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