1. Elicit vs. Illicit

Elicit, meaning “draw forth,” comes from the Latin term lacere, “to entice or lure.” Illicit means “unlawful”; the root word stems from the Latin term licere, “to be allowed,” from which license also derives. To keep them separate in your mind, connect elicit with exit and illicit with illegal.

2. Emigrate vs. Immigrate

To emigrate is to leave one country and live elsewhere; to immigrate is to move to a country. To maintain the distinction between the two, associate emigrate with embark and immigrate with immerse.

3. Eminent vs. Imminent

Eminent means “prominent” or “conspicuous” and is generally associated with accomplished people; imminent means “about to happen,” often with the sense of something of import or involving danger. To help you remember which is which, think of an eminent person as one who emits greatness, and connect imminent with immediate.

4. Emulate vs. Imitate

Emulate can be directly synonymous with imitate but often has the sense of an effort to try to be equal to, whereas to imitate is to try to match an example, or to resemble. To keep them straight, think of emulating as something to do to become eminent, whereas imitating involves mimicking.

5. Explicit vs. Implicit

Something explicit is something fully developed or revealed, and something implicit is not expressed directly, though it can also mean “potential” or “without questioning.” Remember the difference between the two by thinking of explicit in regard to something X rated and implicit as referring to something implied.

An analog is something related to physical quantities (hence the name; analog comes from a Greek word meaning “proportion”): An analog clock, for example, shows the passage of time by measuring it with a “hand” that pivots on a central axis, while a measuring tape represents the length of a tangible phenomenon such as a room’s dimensions.

By contrast, digital refers to a device’s reading of binary units, zeros and ones, to perform functions and to the storage of information as binary units rather than an analog recording medium such as magnetic ribbon. Ironically, however, digit stems from the Latin term digitus, meaning “finger” or “toe.” The path from appendages to algorithms involves the use of fingers to count, thus the extension of the definition of digit to “number below ten.” The use of zeros and tens as the basis of the on-off duality of binary computer systems led the technology to be referred to as digital technology.

Indeed, the word bit, referring to the basic unit of digital information, is a contraction of the phrase “binary digit.”

The adjective digital now refers both to something done or having to do with fingers (for example, “digital manipulation”) and something related to digitally rendered numbers, or to computerized data or to electronics. Two other terms with the same root word are digitalis, referring to a plant popularly known as the foxglove and to a medicine extracted from it, and prestidigitation, a sesquipedalian synonym for magic.

Digitalis is a Latinized form of the German word fingerhut (“thimble”), because of the resemblance of the plant’s flowers to the sewing implement. Prestidigitation, meanwhile, is another Latin-looking invention influenced by prestige, which comes from the Latin word praestigiae, “juggler’s tricks.” (Prestige acquired a laudatory meaning and connotation only in the early twentieth century.) It’s a combination of the Italian word presto and digit — hence, “quick fingers.”

Analog, meanwhile, calls to mind its full-form predecessor analogue (which spelling for the adjectival form is also preferred in British English), which means “something similar.” An analogy is also a similarity, or it can refer to a correspondence or to another form of comparison. Analogous is the adjectival form.

It’s easily confused with a similar-sounding but unrelated word: atrophy, which refers to physical or psychological decline: Atrophy, which serves as a verb as well, stems from the Greek word trephein, which means “to nourish”; the prefix a- indicates antonymic form, as in apolitical or atheism.

Atrophy can also mean poor development or loss of a part of an animal or plant, and in that sense it’s related to dystrophy, which in general refers to a condition resulting from poor nutrition, though it’s more familiar as part of the phrase “muscular dystrophy”; that, by contrast, identifies a hereditary disease that results in wasting away of muscle tissue.

Trophy, however, meaning “a prize” or “a memorial,” is — despite the ph spelling — from trope, not trephein. (It evolved from a second sense of trope as “a rout, a victory.”) It’s related, therefore, to the English word trope, which refers to a figure of speech or a cliché (a “turn” of phrase); the primary sense of that word is “a device or theme,” as in a common and perhaps trite plot element in a war movie or a tearjerker.

Trop- features at the head of other words, too: tropic, referring to the two parallel lines of latitude that cross over the tropics, and tropism, which means “a tendency, inclination, or propensity.” The syllable also appears in numerous medical and scientific terms, such as autotropism and somatotropin.

Meanwhile, the related words provoke and revoke are also potent in their own right. To provoke is to prompt anger or an action (and is thus, in a limited sense, a direct synonym of evoke and invoke), while revoke means “to take back or recall.”

The root element common to this foursome, -voke, is an English form of the Latin stem voc-, from vox (“voice”), from which many words with the element voc-, such as vocal and vocabulary, are derived. (Voice itself is different in form because of its detour through French.) Another word with the voc- element is advocate, which means “to support vocally”; the noun form is identical.

The noun forms for evoke, invoke, and their cousins provoke and revoke are identical, produced by omitting the letters k and e and adding the ending -ation — resulting in evocation, invocation, provocation, and revocation — which correctly suggests that vocation and avocation also share an etymological origin (respectively, they mean, “calling,” as in what work one is called to do in life, and “call away,” as in an activity one engages in outside of work).

However, although avocados call to me, the word is unrelated; it’s from a Spanish alteration of ahuacatl, a word from the Nahuatl language, spoken by the Aztecs and by more than a million Mexicans. (I invite you to look up that word’s meaning yourself.)

The origin of the former word is the Latin term praecedere (“go before”), while the latter stems from the Latin word procedere (“go forward, advance”). Interestingly, however, the prefixes share a sense: Pre- and pro- can both mean “before,” though pro- usually signals “in favor of.”

Each word is part of a family of inflections and terms based on it: One writes, for example, that a rainstorm preceded snowfall later that night, or that the preceding chapter of a book is longer than the one that follows it.

Precedent refers to a situation that serves as an exemplar for others that follow. It’s employed formally in law to refer to a rule or principle that serves as a reference for judgments in cases similar to those in which the rule or principle was first set forth. Informally, laypeople refer to “establishing a precedent” for anything from a habit to a protocol. Meanwhile, a precession is a “coming before.” (In physics and astronomy, this term refers to the alteration in the orientation of a rotating body’s axis.)

Inflectional forms of proceed are used to state that someone proceeded to act in some way or do something that they had not been doing previously, or that they are proceeding to do so now. The plural of the latter form is also a noun referring to the published minutes or records of an organization’s meeting.

Procedure, taken directly from French and referring to a sequence for accomplishing a task, is also based on proceed. Procedural can be applied as an adjective (while procedurally is an adverb), and it stands on its own (or modified as “police procedural”) as a noun referring to genre fiction that realistically portrays how an investigation or a similar process is conducted.