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The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between ...
In linguistics, back-formation is the process of forming a new word by removing actual affixes, or parts of the word that is re-analyzed as an affix, from other words to create a base. [5] Examples include: the verb headhunt is a back-formation of headhunter; the verb edit is formed from the noun editor [5]
Metonymy can sometimes be a form of synonymy: the White House is used as a synonym of the administration in referring to the U.S. executive branch under a specific president. [7] Thus, a metonym is a type of synonym, and the word metonym is a hyponym of the word synonym. [citation needed]
Some words might seem to be composed of multiple morphemes but are not. Therefore, not only form but also meaning must be considered when identifying morphemes. For example, the word Madagascar is long and might seem to have morphemes like mad, gas, and car, but it does not. Conversely, some short words have multiple morphemes (e.g. dogs = dog ...
Clipping is also different from back-formation, which proceeds by (pseudo-)morpheme rather than segment, and where the new word may differ in sense and word class from its source. [2] In English, clipping may extend to contraction , which mostly involves the elision of a vowel that is replaced by an apostrophe in writing.
Verbification is sometimes used to create nonce words or joking words. Often, simple conversion is involved, as with formations like beer, as in beer me ("give me a beer") and eye, as in eye it ("look at it"). [clarification needed] Sometimes, a verbified form can occur with a prepositional particle, e.g., sex as in sex it up ("make it sexier").
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
Short compounds may be written in three different forms, which do not correspond to different pronunciations, though: The spaced or open form [6] usually consisting of newer combinations or longer words, [7] such as "distance learning", "player piano", "ice cream". [8] The hyphenated form in which two or more words are connected by a hyphen ...