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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.
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 incompatible with word X): [2] sentence A is X entails sentence A is not Y [3]
For example, the word liver meaning "someone who lives" is only rarely used because the word liver (an internal organ) already exists. [7] 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.
Both words remain in common usage with expected opposite meanings. Surely “apt” and “inept” should not be on this list simply because a humorous deliberate misspelling exists. Of course, once “inept” is removed from the list, someone will naïvely put it back again unless it’s mentioned elsewhere on the page.
In Hungarian linguistic tradition the meaning of a word is signified by uniform (unpaired) apostrophe-shaped quotation marks: die Biene ’méh’ A quotation dash is also used, and is predominant in belletristic literature. – Merre jártál? – kérdezte a köpcös.
When the prefix "re-" is added to a monosyllabic word, the word gains currency both as a noun and as a verb. Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or ...
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).
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as un- , -ation , anti- , pre- etc., introduce a semantic change to the word they are attached to.