Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

The Spanish caer, “to fall”, sounds weird to English ears. But it is closer than it sounds to many English words.

Caer comes from the Latin cadere — meaning “to fall, sink, die” — and the middle ‑d- was lost as Latin grew into Spanish.

From this same Latin root cadere, we get a bunch of English words — mostly that came from the Latin to English via French — including: