Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
This page was last edited on 12 February 2024, at 13:49 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
In linguistics, a neologism (/ n i ˈ ɒ l ə ˌ dʒ ɪ z əm /; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. [1] Most definitively, a word can be considered a neologism once it is published in a dictionary. [2]
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).
In linguistics, back-formation is the process of forming a new word by removing actual affixes, or parts of the word that is re-analyzed as an affix, from other words to create a base. [5] Examples include: the verb headhunt is a back-formation of headhunter; the verb edit is formed from the noun editor [5]
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 ...
stunt word: a nonce word intentionally coined to demonstrate the creator's cleverness or elicit an emotional reaction, such as admiration or laughter; such words are often noted in the works of Dr. Seuss, as in "Sometimes I am quite certain there's a Jertain in the curtain", in which the one-time use of Jertain refers to some unspecified ...
One example is the suffix -ol used to name alcohols, such as methanol. Its origin is the rebracketing of al‧cohol as alcoh‧ol. The word alcohol derives from the Arabic al-kuḥl, in which al is the definite article and kuḥl (i.e., kohl) is based on the Semitic triliteral root K-Ḥ-L. [6]
A protologism is coined to fill a gap in the language, with the hope of its becoming an accepted word. [8] [9] As an example, when the word protologism itself was coined—in 2003 [10] by the American literary theorist Mikhail Epstein—it was autological: an example of the thing it describes. [11] About the concept and his name for it, Epstein ...