apartheid comes from Afrikaans apartheid ('separateness'), from Dutch apart ('apart, separate') + the suffix -heid ('-hood'). Apart derives from French à part ('to the side'). Morphologically, the word is transparent as a compound: its parts remain visible in the modern spelling, while the older history of those parts supplies the deeper ancestry. In modern use, the noun sense is "a system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination", which keeps the etymology connected to the word's present dictionary value rather than treating it as a merely historical label. The wider word family includes related English forms such as apart, showing how the same base continues to support neighboring English vocabulary. The principal historical forms in the chain include Afrikaans apartheid, which anchor the explanation in named linguistic material.