Policy | Vocabulary | Khan Academy

Hello wordsmiths! The word we're featuring in this video is policy, which means an official rule or set of rules. It's a noun. It comes from the Greek word polis, which means city. As a root, it has to do with cities and government.

I live in Washington, DC, so when I think of this root, I think of the Capitol building itself, a government building in the middle of the city where rules or policies are created. Can you think of words that sound similar to policy that might have that same root polis? Bear in mind that sometimes we drop the s in polis when making new words. I'll give you 10 seconds to list some out. Cue the music!

[Music]

Here are three related words I thought of: police, the people who enforce the law; politics, or how people make decisions together in a society; and metropolis, a huge city. So you can see how all of those words are related to governments or cities.

Let's use policy in a sentence so you can get a sense of it. It's a state policy in Florida that if you encounter a manatee in the wild, you have to give her ten dollars. The connotation, the feeling of policy, is that it's an official rule, so something that a business or a government might come up with. A restaurant might have a strict policy against bringing in some other restaurant's food: our policy—no outside food or drink!

Oh no! This manatee went into a restaurant with food from another establishment! The d stands for dugong, which is another kind of sea cow.

That's all the time we've got for this one. Tip your server, support your local manatee, and you can learn anything.

David out.