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Non-standard: After finding the suspected bomb, Pennsylvania state police were called in to diffuse it. [45] desert and dessert. As a verb, desert means to abandon. As a noun, desert is a barren or uninhabited place; an older meaning of the word is "what one deserves", as in the idiom just deserts. A dessert is the last course of a meal.
Terminology varies, however; it may also be called a verbal noun or adjective (on the grounds that it is derived from a verb). In other cases the latter terms may be applied additionally, or exclusively, to gerunds and participles, as well as other non-finite verb forms such as infinitives .
Fillers are words like well and um that fill gaps in discourse while speakers search for words, or are often used for effect, e.g. She was, um, not the most intelligent of teachers is a politer way of saying she was stupid. Fillers share certain features with interjections, most notably they are distinct from the rest of the clause in terms of ...
The expansion of an acronym like PIN or HIV may be well known to English speakers, but the acronyms themselves have come to be treated as words, so little thought is given to what their expansion is (and "PIN" is also pronounced the same as the word "pin"; disambiguation is probably the source of "PIN number"; "SIN number" for "Social Insurance ...
However, in some Wakashan and Salish languages, all content words may be understood as verbal in nature. In Lushootseed, a Salish language, all words with 'noun-like' meanings can be used predicatively, where they function like verb. For example, the word sbiaw can be understood as '(is a) coyote' rather than simply 'coyote'.
From "argle-bargle" to "xiphoid," these weird words will help you spice up any topic you discuss. Take a glance and get ready to expand your lexicon! Related: 50 Gen Z Slang Words You Need To Know ...
In English, inside a word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as cat inside the word cats), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes , may be added before or after the root, like the -s in cats , which indicates plurality but is always ...
Different words have different functions depending on their lexical category. For example, while a pronoun like who may typically function as a subject, a preposition like when rarely does so. Moreover, the form of the word may constrain its function. Whose (the genitive form of who), for instance, can function as a determiner, while who and ...