One of the rewarding aspects of exploring words with Word Microscope is discovering word families. From examining a particular word you can then begin to look at other words which share the same base element. This is an excellent way to expand vocabulary.
Here's an example from our on-line glossary.
The word <family> itself is part of a word family that includes:
family families familiar unfamiliar
familiarise familiarising familiarises familiarly
Word Families illustrate relationships between words in English as it exists now. Examining the history of words in the same family can show you how apparently unrelated words became connected.
For example the etymology for <family> tells us the original meaning of the word "family" was connected to the Latin word for "a household servant", <familia>, which explains why a supernatural servant eg. a witch's cat, became known as a "familiar".
In Word Microscope, you will create a word family related to the specimen word and working base.
Here is the Word Microscope Findings Log entry for an investigation of the word <given>, showing the word family created by the user so far. You could probably think of more words to add!
In Word Microscope you can clearly see the words and their word sums which helps to build up an understanding of how the different words relate to each other.
Word Microscope will, on request, automatically combine the Word Sums in your current Word Family to create a word matrix from them.
You can learn more about word matrices in the next section.