Definitions
Wiktionary
- n. linguistics A bound morpheme within a complex word which is a fossil and whose meaning is opaque to the present speakers of the language. May refer narrowly to morphemes which occur in a single word, or more broadly to fossilized morphemes generally.
Etymologies
- From the cran- of cranberry as an archetype. cran- is from Kraan ("crane"), but is now a bound morpheme, hence an example of a cranberry morpheme. (Wiktionary)
Examples
Sorry, no example sentences found.
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘cranberry morpheme’.
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The Marriage of Pretty Words
A list of two words or more, which were singularly pretty or found to be pleasing, but sounds even better when used together!
sweet tooth fairy, prancing peony, coy boy toy, sour puss, paper tiger, whipped buttercream, dandy lion, clothes horse, scare crow, beauty parlor, pantomime horse, shark bait and 68 more...
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bilby's Words
pandemic, whirl, guffaw, ethereal, feisty, dunt, ephemeral, pule, flipergebet, prink, maunder, gammon and 1023 more...
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rememberers
prolix, ageusia, animadversion, anodyne, antic, arabesque, beadle, brachymetropia, colophon, desquamation, diaphoresis, diegesis and 3250 more...
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No Home
List of random words that have yet to be categorized.
Wonderlust, hubbub, hootenanny, ladyfriend, saturnine, labyrinthine, iridescent, ubiquitous, crevis, hermes, blasphemous, saccharine and 39 more...
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Because I Like Them : C --- D
clawscrunt, comprivigni, dinmont, drizzen, desticate, corf, collop, caboodle, canoodle, curfuffle, cynarctomachy, chionablepsia and 56 more...
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coinages that deserve attention
stragedy, cranberry morpheme, passatism, yugosalvia, panglish, schlort, world watching web, salacious invertible, dickful thinking, ovular, acute intramalar ..., supercalifreakina... and 19 more...
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Words Which Caught my Fancy
Just a private list of words which I enjoy (:
schadenfreude, quixotic, serendipity, ennui, loquacious, taciturn, persnickety, zeitgeist, tchotchke, fhqwhgads, moxie, pixie and 40 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for cranberry morpheme.
reesetee Found a new one this weekend: cranergy. May 5, 2008
Prolagus I'm sure it's time to start a cranctionary list. Apr 16, 2008
sionnach What you get if you chop a meaningful part off a word and there’s a meaningless part left. If you take the word cranberry and chop off berry, you’re left with cran. That’s a cranberry morpheme. That cran chunk seems like it should mean something, because it’s kind of like the blue in blueberry, the goose in gooseberry, or the cloud in cloudberry. But it doesn’t. It just distinguishes cranberries from other types of berry. Cranberry morphemes can often be traced back to meaningful elements etymologically, but are not meaningful for contemporary speakers.
(thenameinspector.com)
Or, as the Lexicon of Linguistics puts it:
"a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned a meaning nor a grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other."
EXAMPLE: the English word cranberry seems morphologically complex, since it must be distinguished from words such as raspberry, blackberry, and gooseberry. Still, cran has no meaning and does not function as an independent word: cranberry is the only word in which cran appears. The existence of cranberry-morphemes plays a role in the discussion whether morphology is word based or morpheme based. Apr 16, 2008