Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A clitic that is attached to the beginning of another word.
  • adjective Of or relating to a proclitic or proclisis; forming an accentual unit with the following word.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In Greek grammar, dependent in accent upon the following word: noting certain monosyllabic words so closely attached to the word following as to have no accent.
  • noun In Greek grammar, a monosyllabic word which leans upon or is so closely attached to a following word as to have no independent accent.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective (Gr. Gram.) Leaning forward; -- said of certain monosyllabic words which are so closely attached to the following word as not to have a separate accent.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun linguistics A clitic which phonetically joins with the following word. In English, the dialectal form t' is an example. In Arabic, conjunctions and prepositions that have only one letter, such as و (wa-), always attach as a prefix to the following word.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[New Latin procliticus : pro– + Late Latin (en)cliticus, enclitic; see enclitic.]

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