4.8 Street Music and Apples

Irregular

What does ‘irregular’ mean? Can you see a familiar word inside this word – the root word?

The root word is “regular” and the “ir-” is an prefix, something you add to the beginning of a word to change its meaning.

Here are some examples of other prefixes:

“un-” means not, so if you add “un-” to happy, you change it unhappy. This means "not happy".

The prefix “ir-” also means not, so irregular means ‘not regular’. So what do you think ‘irregular structure’ (like the structure of Street Music) means?

Answer The poem does not have a regular structure. It changes throughout and is organized differently than most of the poems they have read so far.