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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.
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 ...
A morphological gap is the absence of a word that could exist given the morphological rules of a language, including its affixes. [1] For example, in English a deverbal noun can be formed by adding either the suffix -al or -(t)ion to certain verbs (typically words from Latin through Anglo-Norman French or Old French).
For example, the word undevout appears in Webster's dictionary of 1828, while the pattern of non-person could conceivably be extended to non-platypus. Conversely, some words appear to be a prefixed form of an opposite, but the opposite term does not exist, such as inept, which appears to be in-+ *ept; such a word is known as an unpaired word.
What is the purpose of the "Paired word(s)" column - to give an antonym that actually exists, rare as it may be, or to state what the antonym ought logically to be? At the moment we have feckless, gormless and ruthless. You could go on forever listing non-existent -ful words - homeful, sleeveful, timeful just to name a few.
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 ...
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").
Affixes may be inflectional, indicating how a certain word relates to other words in a larger phrase, or derivational, changing either the part of speech or the actual meaning of a word. [6] Most roots in English are free morphemes (e.g. examin-in examination, which can occur in isolation: examine), but others are bound (e.g. bio-in biology).