>I'm not trying to be picky over spelling BTW, just an interest in variant spellings of words.
>
>This is the nearest I've found yet from OED :
>
>"æ-, pref. The stress form of OE. a- (see a- pref. 1) used with sbs. and adjs., the unaccented a- being used with verbs. Meaning: out, off, onward, away; hence, from idea of doing away, a privative = un-, -less. Thus æ´-fyrmða washings off, ablutions, æ´-gilde without payment, æ´-mód out of his mind, æ´-scære unshorn, without tonsure, æ´-rist arising, æ´-cumba what is combed off, oakum. Only a few examples survived in ME. as e-rede unadvised, æ-rist, a-rist rise. The West Germ. dialects had two forms answering to Goth. us- (ur-): viz. OHG. ur-, OE. or- with sbs. and adjs.; OHG. ar-, er-, ir-, mod.G. er-, OE. ar- (rarely preserved), a- with vbs., æ´- with sbs. and adjs. This æ´- represented an earlier a¯- for ar- ('æ´&sd.mód = 'â&sd.mód = 'ar&sd.mód, like stræ´te = WGer. strâte). Ær- reappears in Layamon in ær-wene, ær-witte (where it may be due to a mixture of OE. æ´- and or-). "


Agh! What a linguistic mess! I can understand bits of it, enough to note that we're getting away from Greek in the above defs, and more into the Germanic/English word ancestry (which does have some Greek osmosis, of course) - but isn't too pertinent to the straight Greek I was referring to.