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Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is a 2015 illustrated non-fiction book created by Randall Munroe, in which the author attempts to explain various complex subjects using only the 1,000 most common English words. Munroe conceptualized the book in 2012, when drawing a schematic of the Saturn V rocket for his webcomic xkcd.
The word or group of words that is to be defined is called the definiendum, and the word, group of words, or action that defines it is called the definiens. [6] For example, in the definition "An elephant is a large gray animal native to Asia and Africa", the word "elephant" is the definiendum, and everything after the word "is" is the ...
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. [1] [2] Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning.
Clipping is also different from back-formation, which proceeds by (pseudo-)morpheme rather than segment, and where the new word may differ in sense and word class from its source. [2] In English, clipping may extend to contraction , which mostly involves the elision of a vowel that is replaced by an apostrophe in writing.
For example, in the word quirkiness, the root is quirk, but the stem is quirky, which has two morphemes. Moreover, some pairs of affixes have identical phonological form but different meanings. For example, the suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g. sell ⇒ seller ) or inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller ).
Technical definitions are used to introduce the vocabulary which makes communication in a particular field succinct and unambiguous. For example, the iliac crest from medical terminology is the top ridge of the hip bone (see ).
For example, a person saying the Japanese word e.g. "はい" (/haɪ/) = 'yes' on a high level pitch would command attention. Pronouncing the same word using a mid tone, could represent an answer to a roll-call. Finally, pronouncing this word with a low pitch could signify acquiescence: acceptance of something reluctantly. [16]
Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men"). During the Renaissance, scholars meticulously enumerated and classified figures of speech.