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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 .
The word redrum (i.e., "red rum") is used this way for murder in the Stephen King novel The Shining (1977) and its film adaptation (1980). [ 11 ] Anadromes exist in other written languages as well, as can be seen, for example, in Spanish orar ↔ raro or French l'ami naturel ("the natural friend") ↔ le rut animal ("the animal rut").
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]
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.
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [1] [2] enantionymy (enantio-means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
Back-formation may be similar to the reanalyses or folk etymologies when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets was not originally a plural; it is a loanword from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez).
It has also entered standard English and is affixed to many different words to denote enthusiasm or obsession with that subject. Cambridge Dictionary has defined mania as “a very strong interest in something that fills a person's mind or uses up all their time” Britannica Dictionary defined mania as a mental illness in which a person ...
Thus, the word do, consisting of a single morpheme, is a verb, as is the word redo, which consists of the prefix re-and the base root do. However, there are a few prefixes in English that are class-changing in that the word resulting after prefixation belongs to a lexical category that is different from the lexical category of the base.