About Us

Conifer is three things: a word matrix maker, a growing library of matrices and word sums, and a community of people who care about literacy. It’s for educators, tutors, speech-language pathologists, reading specialists, homeschooling parents, and anyone else curious about how words work. Build your own matrices piece by piece, or generate them from word sums. Browse a curated collection of 300+ matrices, plus everything other members have shared. Create, share, study, and contribute!

A word matrix is a map of a base element and the affixes and other bases that attach to it. Every matrix is built around a single base, whose earliest attested meaning is often still traceable, in some small way, in the words built from it today. Prefixes sit to the left of the base, suffixes to the right. The words that can be built from a shared base make up that base’s word family. Some matrices include secondary bases, but a word family is defined by its primary base.

Combining elements from a matrix builds real words, and often reveals why they’re spelled the way they are. It shows students that “adventure” isn’t an arbitrary string of letters to memorize, but a combination of <ad + vent + ure>. Words we might not see as connected, like “invention” and “eventful,” turn out to share the same base: <vent>. All three come from the Latin verb venire, with the denotation “come.” Investigate structure, meaning, and history together, and spelling starts to look logical rather than arbitrary.

Kathleen Love, Conifer’s founder, works with students at Rain City Reading, her literacy-focused speech-language pathology practice. She has seen that students engage more deeply when they investigate why words are spelled as they are. Approached this way, spelling stops being a chore and becomes an adventure full of discoveries. Kathleen believes this rich, rewarding work deserves an equally rich tool. Conifer began as her effort to build one.

Conifer was inspired by the researchers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, interventionists, and classroom educators of the Structured Word Inquiry community, who championed and refined the use of word matrices and word sums. Real Spelling, WordWorks Kingston, and Linguist~Educator Exchange laid the groundwork for this understanding of orthography. Countless people provided the welcoming, warm community Conifer needed to grow, and it would not exist without them.

The library matrices were contributed by educators around the world, whose ideas shaped what Conifer is and where it’s headed.

Conifer is built on community, history, and a commitment to literacy. We’re excited to welcome you into our woods!