Ex-

1. A prefix from the latin preposition, ex, akin to Gr. ‘ex or ‘ek signifying out of, out, proceeding from. Hence, in composition, it signifies out of, as, in exhale, exclude; off, from, or out. as in exscind; beyond, as, in excess, exceed, excel; and sometimes has a privative sense of without, as in exalbuminuos, exsanguinous. In some words, it intensifies the meaning; in others, it has little affect on the signification. It becomes ef- before f, as in effuse. The form e- occurs instead of ex- before b, d, g, l, m, n, r, and v, as in ebullient, emanate, enormous, etc. In words from the French it often appears as es-, sometimes as s- or e-; as, escape, scape, elite. Ex-, prefixed to names implying office, station, condition, denotes that the person formerly held the office, or is out of the office or condition now; as, ex-president, ex-governor, ex-mayor, ex-convict. The Greek form ‘ex becomes ex in English, as in exarch; ‘ek becomes ec, as in eccentric.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.