Language of connections
Yorùbá makes long words out of short ones. It does this constantly, and it is doing it today, in ordinary speech. Learn the short words and a great deal of the language opens by itself.
Every long word has short words inside it
ilé means home. ayé means world, and also life. Together they make ilé ayé, which means Earth.
Once you have seen one, you start seeing them everywhere. ìwé is a book. ilé-ìwé is a school, a house of books. ọmọ is a child, and ọmọ ilé ìwé is a student: a child of the house of books. Three small words, stacked, and the last one you never had to be taught.
People often treat this as history — where a word came from, once, a long time ago. In Yorùbá it is not history. Recognising how a word is put together is part of being fluent in it, and it is one of the things students in our own classes enjoy most.
So every entry here shows both directions. Open ilé ayé and its two parts are listed under Component words. Open ilé and the words built from it are listed under Used in. The source data only records whichever direction somebody happened to type; we work out the other one and show both.
Words come in families
A vocabulary list of twenty words is twenty separate things to remember. A family of twenty is not, because the same short words keep coming back in different company, and each time one comes back it is easier.
Here are five families. Each starts with a handful of short words and ends with the longer words they make between them, so that half the list is words you never have to learn on their own.
They are different sizes, and the smallest is the one to read first. Nine words in it, and two of those nine say something English cannot say without a whole phrase.
One: your mother’s mother
Yorùbá has no word for grandmother. It does not need one.
ìyá is mother. So your mother’s mother is ìyá ìyá, and your mother’s father is bàbá ìyá. You say what the person is, and then whose.
5 words to learn
4 words you can now read
Nine words, and two of them are things English cannot say in one word at all.
omiye is a child of the same mother. ọmiba is a child of the same father. English needs a whole phrase for either — half-brother on my mother’s side — and Yorùbá needs one short word, made of two words a child already knows.
Two: the place where it happens
ilé is a house. Put it in front of a thing and you get the place where that thing is.
Learn ilé and seven ordinary nouns, and seven more words come with them.
8 words to learn
7 words you can now read
A bird’s house is a nest. A bee’s house is a hive. A king’s house is a palace. None of those is a metaphor in Yorùbá — it is what the word says.
One of the eight is quietly two words already. oúnjẹ, food, is ohun ("thing") pressed together with jíjẹ ("eating"): the thing that is eaten. So a restaurant is a house of the thing that is eaten, which is three words deep and still perfectly plain.
Three: the one who belongs to it
You now have ilé-ìwé, a school. Put ọmọ, a child, in front of the whole thing: ọmọ ilé ìwé, the child of the house of books. A student.
That word is three words deep and you could read it before anyone told you. ọmọ goes on to do the same job everywhere else.
6 words to learn
6 words you can now read
ọmọ is a child, and in front of another word it is the one who belongs to that thing. The child of the school is a student. The child of the team is a member. ọmọ-ọwọ́, the child of the hand, is a baby: one small enough to carry.
And the last word turns the unit around. ilé in front of ọmọ, rather than the other way, gives ilé ọmọ — the house of the child, which is the womb. Order decides which word is doing the describing.
Four: where a thing is
ní is a small word meaning at or in. It goes in front of a noun to say where something is, and the nouns it uses are mostly parts of the body.
9 words to learn
7 words you can now read
Six ways of saying where something is, and every one of them is ní plus a noun you would have learned anyway.
Read the left column again. inú is the stomach, and inside a thing is its stomach. etí is the ear, and the edge of the sea is its ear — etíkun, the coast. The body is where Yorùbá gets its map.
ní also changes as it joins: ní and òkè give lókè, not ní òkè. There are rules behind that and you do not need them yet. Meet enough examples and the change stops surprising you, which is the right moment to learn why it happens.
Five: the subject, and the person who studies it
This last one is a step up in register — the words are the kind that turn up in a university, not a kitchen. The machinery is exactly the same, and here it runs four steps deep.
Two of the words to learn are not whole words. ì- and oní- are pieces that go on the front of a word and change what kind of thing it is. They are as much a part of the language as any noun, and Yorùbá leans on them constantly.
8 words to learn
6 words you can now read
Follow the list from the top and you can watch one word grow. mọ̀ is to know. ìmọ̀ is knowing, made a thing. onímọ̀ is the person who holds it. onímọ̀ ẹ̀dá-èdè is the person who holds it about the making of language — a linguist. Four steps, and every step is one short piece added to the front.
Then read the two in the middle side by side. ìmọ̀ ẹ̀dá-èdè is linguistics; onímọ̀ ẹ̀dá-èdè is a linguist. Three words each, two of the three the same, and the one that changes moves you from the subject to the person who does it. That is the same move as ilé-ìwé and ọmọ ilé ìwé, in a suit.
This is also how Yorùbá makes words it did not have yesterday, and it does not do it by borrowing. kòkòrò àrùn, a pathogen, is the insect of the disease.
Guess before you look it up
When you meet a long word, look inside it for a word you already have. Decide what you think the whole thing means. Then check.
ṣe means to do. ṣiṣẹ́ means to work. ṣàlàyé means to explain.
Some of those you can predict and some you cannot. ilé and ayé giving Earth is not obvious in advance. It does not matter. Guessing and being wrong fixes a word in the memory in a way that reading it in a list never does.
In a classroom this is a question, not an explanation. Give the class two words they know. Ask what the two together will mean. Take their answers before you give yours.
Tone marks are part of the word
gbà means to rescue. gbá means to hit. Same letters, different marks, two different words. A word learned without its marks is half a word.
This matters more here than in a phrasebook, because the marks are what tell you which word is inside a longer one. Two of the families above use a word spelled egbe: ẹgbẹ́ is a team, and ẹ̀gbẹ́ is the side of something. One of them gives you ọmọ ẹgbẹ́, a member of a club. The other gives you lẹ́gbẹ̀ẹ́, meaning beside. Learn either without its marks and you have lost the difference for good.
You can still search without them. Type gba and you get all eight words spelled that way, each with its meaning, and you pick the one you meant.
Say which two words, the first time
This is mostly for teachers, and it is the easiest thing to skip.
Do not define ilé ayé as "Earth" and move on. It is two words, a student can see it is two words, and saying which two costs one sentence. The same goes for the ones that do not look like compounds, where it is skipped far more often. sọ̀rọ̀ means to speak, and it is sọ ("to say") pressed together with ọ̀rọ̀ ("word"). sọ̀rọ̀ sókè, the name of this dictionary, is four words: sọ ("to say"), ọ̀rọ̀ ("word"), sí ("to") and òkè ("heights"). Speak up.
What students do not need early are the rules for how words combine and how combining changes the sounds. Those exist, and they can wait. Keep putting combinations in front of a class and they will start predicting the changes before anyone states a rule. Teach the rule then.
Check a breakdown before you teach it
Look the word up here first. This dictionary is built from Wiktionary, which is crowdsourced and uneven, and many words have no breakdown at all. It is still the most complete source of these we know of, which is why it is worth checking your own knowledge against it — in both directions.
Where the source does not say which meaning a word was built from, the entry says so rather than choosing one for you. Of the 6,273 entries here, 2,314 record their parts, and only 797 have every part traced to a specific word. If a word you know is missing its breakdown, you can add it to Wiktionary and it will appear here after the next refresh. The Contribute page lists the edits that are already identified.
Teach students to compare sources
There is no single authority for Yorùbá, and students should hear that before they start looking things up.
- This dictionary for lookups, and for how words are built.
- Glosbe to see several dictionaries side by side.
- Google Translate is unreliable for Yorùbá. Fine for a rough idea, not for anything you are teaching.
Students who are confident online are often still poor at judging which source to trust. Show them how you decide.
Where to go next
- Key building block words — the 25 roots that build the most words in this dictionary, with examples of each. Build your own unit from any of them.
- Our courses teach Yorùbá in a set order.
- Our games are for practice.