Strategic | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

I love it when a plan comes together, word Smiths, because the word I'm featuring in this video is strategic. Strategic, it's an adjective, and it means related to a plan. It's the adjective form of strategy, which is a way of thinking about making effective and successful plans or the plan itself.

Strategic comes from Greek; the word Stratos means general, as in the commander of an army. Being strategic means you're thinking like a general, commanding troops, like you're trying to play five games of Chess at once. The -ic part, the IC part, is an adjective forming suffix, so it turns nouns into modifiers, into adjectives. So strategic means like a general.

What do you see from these word parts? What do you see in strateg? I’ll give you 10 seconds to come up with similar words. Throw in a little music here we go. [Music]

Here’s what I came up with: there’s strategy, which is like a trick or a cunning little plan that you pull off. In other words, a maneuver. Cosmic, which means it has to do with outer space, right? It’s the word Cosmos plus the adjective forming suffix -ic. Cosmos is outer space.

Strategize, which is the verb form of strategic or strategy, means to make plans, to come up with a strategy. Okay, troops, follow me over to the next screen where we'll use strategic in a few sentences.

If you're strategic with your chocolate chip placement, you can use cookies to spell words. This one appears to say "con" if you're clever about it. If you thought through the plan and its implications, if you're strategic, you can create cookie mischief, which is probably one of the 10 best kinds of mischief.

Okay, let's try it as a noun now as strategy. After three straight days of failure, the scientists decided to attempt a new strategy. What was that strategy? I don't know, I didn't read their lab notes. And it kind of appears as if those lab notes have gone into the trash. But here's what I do know: you can learn anything, wordsmiths.

David out.