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Back slang is not restricted to words spoken phonemically backwards. English frequently makes use of diphthongs, which is an issue for back slang since diphthongs cannot be reversed. The resulting fix slightly alters the traditional back slang. An example is trousers and its diphthong, ou, which is replaced with wo in the back slang version ...
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 of a backronym as a mnemonic is the Apgar score, used to assess the health of newborn babies.The rating system was devised by and named after Virginia Apgar.Ten years after the initial publication, the backronym APGAR was coined in the US as a mnemonic learning aid: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration. [6]
Back-formation is either the process of creating a new lexeme (less precisely, a new "word") by removing actual or supposed affixes, or a neologism formed by such a process. Back-formations are shortened words created from longer words, thus back-formations may be viewed as a sub-type of clipping .
An example, in English, of boustrophedon as used in inscriptions in ancient Greece (Lines 2 and 4 read right-to-left.) Boustrophedon (/ ˌ b uː s t r ə ˈ f iː d ən / [1]) is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style.
The term wide boy is also often used in the same sense spliff * (slang) a hand-rolled cigarette containing a mixture of marijuana and tobacco, also joint. (Also used in US; joint, j, or blunt more widely used.) spotted dick an English steamed suet pudding containing dried fruit (usually currants), commonly served with custard. squaddie
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
[1] [2] A general meaning of "contradiction in terms" is recorded by the 1902 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. [3] The term oxymoron is first recorded as Latinized Greek oxymōrum, in Maurus Servius Honoratus (c. AD 400); [4] it is derived from the Greek word ὀξύς oksús "sharp, keen, pointed" [5] and μωρός mōros "dull ...