§24. Root, Stem, and Base
The body of a word, to which the terminations are attached, is called the Stem.
The Stem contains the idea of the word without relations; but, except in the first part of a compound (as, arti-fex, artificer), it cannot ordinarily be used without some termination to express them.1
Thus the stem vōc- denotes voice; with -s added it becomes vōx, a voice or the voice, as the subject or agent of an action; with -is it becomes vōcis, and signifies of a voice.
J. H. Allen and J. B. Greenough, New Latin Grammar (Boston: Ginn, 1903). Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.