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In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The line between word formation and semantic change is sometimes a bit blurry; what one person views as a new use of an old word, another person might view as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form; see Conversion (linguistics). Word formation can also be contrasted with the formation of idiomatic expressions, though sometimes words can form from multi-word phrases; see Compound (linguistics) and Incorporation (linguistics).

A similar concept is Derivation.

See also

The following articles describe various mechanisms of word formation:

• Agglutination (the process of forming new words from existing ones by adding affixes to them, like shame + less + ness → shamelessness)
• Back-formation (removing seeming affixes from existing words, like forming edit from editor)
• Blending (a word formed by joining parts of two or more older words, like smog, which comes from smoke and fog)
  • Acronym (a word formed from initial letters of the words in a phrase, like English laser from light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation)
  • Clipping (morphology) (taking part of an existing word, like forming ad from advertisement)
• Compound (linguistics) (a word formed by stringing together older words, like earthquake)
  • Incorporation (linguistics) (a compound of a verb and an object or particle, like intake)
• Conversion (linguistics) (forming a new word from an existing identical one, like forming the verb green from the existing adjective)
• Loanword (a word borrowed from another language, like cliché, which comes from French)
  • Calque (borrowing a word or phrase from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation; for example the English phrase to lose face, which is a calque from Chinese)
  • Phono-semantic matching (matching a foreign word with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root)
  • Semantic loan (the extension of the meaning of a word to include new, foreign meanings)
• Neologism (a completely new word, like quark)
  • Onomatopoeia (the creation of words that imitate natural sounds, like the bird name cuckoo)

Literature

• Hadumod Bussmann (1996), Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, London: Routledge.
• Joachim Grzega (2004), Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie, Heidelberg: Winter.
• Peter Koch (2002), “Lexical Typology from a Cognitive and Linguistic Point of View”, in D. Alan Cruse et al. (eds), Lexicology: An International Handbook on the Nature and Structure of Words and Vocabularies / Lexikologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wörtern und Wortschätzen, [Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 21], Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, vol. 1, pp. 1142-1178.
• Ghil'ad Zuckermann (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. (Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change). ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.

External links

• Forming New Root Words: Company Name and Product Research