The building blocks of English
Affixes
-grade
A division; a method of locomotion.
Latin gradus, a step.
The sense of a division appears in centigrade, having a hundred divisions, particularly as applied to the thermometer scale. The sense of locomotion occurs in retrograde, directed or moving backwards, and figuratively in anterograde (Latin ante, before), directed forwards in time.
The ending often appears in adjectives that indicate methods of animal locomotion: digitigrade, walking on the toes or digits; orthograde, walking upright (the opposite is pronograde, going on all fours; Latin pronus, prone); plantigrade, walking upon the soles of the feet; and tardigrade, moving slowly (Latin tardus, slow), a term sometimes applied to the sloths.
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