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An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym , with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.
Likewise, a potential word can be blocked if it is a synonym of an existing word. An older, more common word blocks a potential synonym, known as token-blocking. For example, the word stealer ("someone who steals") is also rarely used, because the word thief already exists. Not only individual words, but entire word formation processes may be ...
An example is "inept," which seems to be "in-" + *"ept," although the word "ept" itself does not exist [citation needed]. Such words are known as unpaired words. Opposites may be viewed as a special type of incompatibility. [1] Words that are incompatible create the following type of entailment (where X is a given word and Y is a different word ...
English does have some words that are associated with gender, but it does not have a true grammatical gender system. "English used to have grammatical gender. We started losing it as a language ...
Many types of other words can also be meaningful nonce words, as is true of most sniglets (words, often stunt words, explicitly coined in the absence of any relevant dictionary word). Other types of misinterpretations or humorous re-wordings can also be nonce words, as may occur in word play , such as certain examples of puns , spoonerisms ...
The term 30-million-word gap (often shortened to just word gap) was originally coined by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in their book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, [1] and subsequently reprinted in the article "The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3". [2]
Which is indeed the nature of many unpaired words, except that normally the pairing is intuitively plausible (even if etymologically invalid). — Smjg 00:02, 7 October 2011 (UTC) See my note at the end of samples — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.192.1.67 17:55, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
A dialectal word can become part of the standard language in a compound, but not in its root form: e.g. blatherskite ("one who talks nonsense"), as Scots has the word skite ("contemptible person"). A word can become obsolete in its root form but remain current in a compound: e.g. lukewarm from Middle English luke ("tepid").