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Neologisms are often formed by combining existing words (see compound noun and adjective) or by giving words new and unique suffixes or prefixes. [9] Neologisms can also be formed by blending words, for example, "brunch" is a blend of the words "breakfast" and "lunch", or through abbreviation or acronym, by intentionally rhyming with existing words or simply through playing with sounds.
Icelandic rafmagn, "electricity", is a half-calqued [definition needed] coinage that literally means "amber power". raf translates the Greek root ἤλεκτρον (ḗlektron), which means "amber" magn, "power", is descriptive of electricity's nature but not a direct calque from the source word "electricity" Samviska (conscience).
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For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word (for example, the adjective clean becomes the ...
the word televise is a back-formation of television; The process is motivated by analogy: edit is to editor as act is to actor. This process leads to a lot of denominal verbs. The productivity of back-formation is limited, with the most productive forms of back-formation being hypocoristics. [5]
pseudoword: a nonsense word that still follows the phonotactics of a particular language and is therefore pronounceable, feeling to native speakers like a possible word (for example, in English, blurk is a pseudoword, but bldzkg is a nonword); thus, pseudowords follow a language's phonetic rules but have no meaning [10]
The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between ...
For example, biography is Greek, agriculture Latin; but this ideal has seen only limited realization in practice, as for example the word television is a hybrid of Greek tele-and Latin -vision (probably so coined because the 'pure' form telescope had already been adopted for another purpose).