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 you are from
ilẹ̀ is the land — the ground itself. It turns up in most of the words Yorùbá uses for where a person comes from, and the other words in this family keep meeting each other.
Watch orí, ìbí and ọjọ́. Each pairs with ilẹ̀, and each pairs with one of the others.
7 words to learn
7 words you can now read
Your lineage is the head of the land. Native means born of the land. A country is a lineage and a language together. Your birthday is the day of your birth, and your age is counted in days of your head.
Nothing here is a chain of one popular word. orí meets ilẹ̀ and it also meets ọjọ́. ìbí meets both of those in turn. Take any two of the four and there is usually a word waiting.
And orílẹ̀-èdè, a country, is built on orílẹ̀, which was already two words — the same second storey as ọmọ ilé ìwé in the third family.
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.
6 words to learn
5 words you can now read
This family is a line rather than a web, which is why it is last. Follow it 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.
Read the last two 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.
Now take a harder job. A germ is too small to see, nobody knew it was there until recently, and a language that has always talked about illness suddenly has to name the thing causing it. English reached for Greek and produced pathogen, a word that tells an English speaker nothing at all.
Yorùbá reached for two words a farmer already had. A pathogen is kòkòrò àrùn: the insect of the disease. ẹ̀rọ does the same work — ìmọ̀ ẹ̀rọ, knowledge of machines, is technology.
This is what a living language looks like. New things keep arriving and Yorùbá keeps meeting them the same way, with the words it already has, so that the newest word on this page is as readable as the oldest.
The easy way to learn and teach Yorùbá
Everything above is one claim: Yorùbá vocabulary is not a list of words, it is a set of connections, and learning the connections is easier than learning the words.
Most dictionaries cannot help you with that, because they put words in alphabetical order and leave it there. That is fine for English, where a word's history is mostly dead — knowing that salary once meant salt money is a nice fact and changes nothing about using it. Copy that design for Yorùbá and you hide the thing a learner most needs, because the meaning of a long word is usually sitting in two shorter ones and an alphabetical list puts those nowhere near it.
So we built this one the other way round, the way we wanted the language presented. Every entry names its parts under Component words and lists what is built from it under Used in. You can start at any word and walk. Vocabulary stops being a list to get through and becomes something with a shape you can feel your way around, which is both easier and considerably more fun.
That is the whole method, and it is the same method with a class in front of you or nobody at all. Look a word up, read what it is made of, read what it makes, follow whichever of those you like.
Learning on your own, the hard part is rarely willingness. It is choosing. Which of these words is worth the effort today, and which can wait a year? A phrasebook cannot tell you, and a frequency list only reports what people happen to say — not what the language is built out of.
The dictionary can answer it a different way: look at where a word sits in the language. A word that turns up inside twenty others is a word you are going to meet twenty more times, whether or not it appears in anybody's first lesson. That is a fact about Yorùbá rather than an opinion about beginners, and you can check it yourself on any entry by reading how long its Used in list is.
Key building block words is the map to start from — the 25 words that build more other words than any others here, each with examples of what it builds. It is generated from the dictionary rather than chosen by us, so it reports what is true of the language rather than what we would like to be true.
What follows is about the order to meet words in. It is written with a class in mind because that is the shorter way to say it, but a learner working alone is doing the same job with one student, and every decision below is one you can make for yourself.
What should come first?
Most beginners' courses teach the body early, and they are right to. It is concrete, you can point at it, and a class can practise it on each other. Alone, it is the vocabulary you can label your own arm with. Those are good reasons and they are all reasons about learners rather than about Yorùbá.
Ask the dictionary and you get the same answer for a much better one.
The body's words are short and plain — ojú (eye), etí (ear), orí (head), inú (stomach), ara (body) — and they hardly combine with each other at all. In this whole dictionary exactly one word is built from two body parts: ojúgun, the shin, the face of the bone. Judged as a unit it goes nowhere.
Judged by what is built on it, it is the best week you will ever spend. Around seventy words elsewhere have a body part inside and are not about bodies, and three body words sit in this dictionary's twenty-five most productive: ojú builds forty-seven words, orí thirty-four, ara thirty-three.
Because feelings are made of the body
The clearest payment comes in the theme you would teach soon after. Yorùbá mostly keeps feelings in nouns rather than adjectives — there is no everyday word for sad, there is a word for sadness — so a teacher reaches for ìbànújẹ́ where an English course would reach for an adjective. Look at what those nouns are made of.
The belly holds what you feel. ìbínú, anger, is bí ("to anger") on inú, the belly. ìbànújẹ́, sadness, is bà jẹ́ ("to spoil") on the same word — the insides gone bad. ominú, doubt, is water in the belly.
The face shows what you are. ojútì, shame, is a face pushed down. gbójú, bravery, is a face gone hard. ojúkòkòrò, greed, is the insect eye.
And the body carries the rest. ìgbéraga, pride, is carrying the body high. rọra, to be careful, is a soft body. fura, to be suspicious, is the body again.
This is not nine words that happen to share a part. It is one idea with nine examples, and the idea is not a metaphor. Yorùbá puts what you feel in the belly and what you are in the face, and it says so in the words themselves. Anyone who met inú and ojú first does not have to be told any of this. They see it coming, and the second set of words costs a fraction of the first. That works exactly the same way alone: learn the body, then look up a feeling, and you will recognise half of it before you read the definition.
Two more questions to ask of any word
In what order? Parts before wholes. ilé and ìwé before ilé-ìwé, and ilé-ìwé before ọmọ ilé ìwé.
Alongside what? Open the word and read Used in. Anything on that list is half-learned already, and the ones that share a second part with each other are the beginnings of a family like the five above.
Do the guessing before you read the answer
None of this works if the answer arrives first.
On your own, that means stopping. A long word turns up, you find the parts you know inside it, and you decide what you think it means before you scroll down. Teaching, it means the same discipline pointed outwards: give the class the parts, ask what the whole thing will mean, and take their answers before you give yours.
You cannot tell in advance which kind you are handing them, and that is what makes it worth doing. Sometimes the room gets it at once. Sometimes the real answer is better than every guess — ilé and ayé, home and world, turning out to mean Earth. Sometimes it is a small joke: ẹ̀kọ́ ilé, house lessons, meaning good manners. Being wrong about a word fixes it in the memory in a way that being told never does, and after a few of them you will start reaching for the next one before anybody offers it.
The same applies to how a word is introduced — by you, to a class, or by you, to yourself. Say which two words it is made of, the first time, every time. Do not define ilé ayé as "Earth" and move on — a student can see it is two words, and saying which two costs one sentence. This matters most for the ones that do not look like compounds. sọ̀rọ̀, to speak, is sọ ("to say") pressed together with ọ̀rọ̀ ("word"). sọ̀rọ̀ sókè, the name of this dictionary, is four: sọ, ọ̀rọ̀, sí ("to") and òkè ("heights"). Speak up.
What can wait is the rules — how words combine, and how combining changes the sounds. Meet enough real examples and you will start predicting the changes before anyone states a rule. That is the moment to go and read the rule, or to teach it, and not before.
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. The families above lean on two words spelled ile: ilé is a house and ilẹ̀ is the ground. One builds ilé-ìwé, a school. The other builds ìbílẹ̀, born of the land. Put both in one word and you get iléelẹ̀, a house at ground level — a bungalow. Learn either without its marks and you cannot read that word again.
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.
Check a breakdown before you trust 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. Of the 6,273 entries here, 2,314 record their parts, and only 797 have every part traced to a specific word. It is still the most complete source of these we know of, which is exactly why it is worth checking against what you already know, 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. 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 and what each one would fix.
Compare sources, and if you are teaching, show your students that you do. There is no single authority for Yorùbá and everybody should know that before they start looking things up. Use this dictionary for lookups and for how words are built. Use Glosbe to see several dictionaries side by side. Treat Google Translate as unreliable for Yorùbá — fine for a rough idea, not for anything you are going to repeat. Being confident online is not the same skill as judging which source to trust, and the second one has to be practised.
The question underneath
All of that still takes the themes as given. Body, family, food, animals — somebody decided long ago that those are what a beginner meets first, and they decided it by thinking about beginners, not about Yorùbá.
The better question is one we cannot fully answer and would like other people to think about: which words does Yorùbá lean on hardest, and what would a course look like if you began there instead?
Part of it is answerable now. Key building block words lists the twenty-five words that build more others than any in this dictionary — ṣe ("to do") builds fifty-eight, ilé ("house") fifty-six, ilẹ̀ ("land") fifty. Whatever your first unit is about, those words are going to turn up inside it, and a learner who has them can take apart words nobody has taught them yet.
The rest is open. Nobody has worked out what order those twenty-five should come in, or which of them can carry a beginner's first conversation, or where a course should put a word that is enormously productive and rarely said on its own. Those are real questions with real answers, and the answers are sitting in the language rather than in anybody's syllabus.
We are working through them ourselves, in our own courses and in the games we are starting to build, and we do not have them settled either. That is the point of putting the dictionary together this way. The question is not what we say about how Yorùbá should be taught. It is what the language tells us.
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 family from any of them.
- Our courses teach Yorùbá in a set order.
- Our games are for practice.