Word studies are an important part of Bible study. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion about word meaning. Over the course of my Christian experience, I’ve encountered hundreds of flawed conclusions about what a word means in this or that passage.
One of the most common word study fallacies is the presumption that a word’s “real” meaning can be discerned by breaking it into constituent parts. Greek sometimes allows this approach. Certain Greek verbs (e.g., kaleo, “to call”) can have prepositions (e.g., ek, “out of, from”) appended to them to form a single word (e.g., ekkaleo, “to call out”). A scholarly Greek-English dictionary (often called a lexicon) will help you to discern legitimate instances when this happens. You don’t need to know Greek to use such tools if you are using a reverse interlinear. Biblical Hebrew words do not work this way at all.
It is generally best to avoid the approach altogether. Most words in any language do not mean what their parts mean. For example, words in English like “butterfly” and “quarterback” do not “really” mean that butter flies or that we’re going to get change. Most words in any given language simply don’t work this way. Approaching word studies as though they do is not only unreliable, but can be quite misleading.
The one consistent rule of word study is that word meaning is determined by an author’s context. There’s no shortcut for observing words in context if you want to understand what a biblical writer meant to say.