apocope

A rhetorical term for the omission of one or more sounds or syllables from the end of a word.

See also:

• Aphaeresis
• Aphesis
• Back-Formation
• Epenthesis
• Metaplasm
• Principle of Least Effort
• Prothesis
• Sound Change

Etymology:

Examples and Observations:

• "In many poor neighborhoods, the Sandinista Front has more street cred than the local youth gang."
  (Tim Rogers, "Even Gangsters Need Their Mamas." Time magazine, Aug. 24, 2007)



• "Season your admiration for a while with an attent ear."
  (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 2)



• "Loss of sounds from the end of a word is known as apocope, as in the pronunciation of child as chile."
  (Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language. Harcourt, 1982)



• "After he left the city, thousands of people toasted him with beer at a barbie, an Australian barbecue."
  ("Pope in Australia," The New York Times, Dec. 1, 1986)



• "Newspapers have their own style and it is important that your feature matches it. For instance, it would be pointless writing a feature for a staid weekly in the style of something more suitable for a lad's mag."
  (Susan Pape and Sue Featherstone, Feature Writing: A Practical Introduction. Sage, 2000)



• "Apocope is a process that deletes word-final segments, including unstressed (reduced) vowels. In Middle English, many words, such as sweet, root, etc. were pronounced with a final [e], but by the time of modern English, these final reduced vowels had been lost. We still see signs of final reduced vowels in the archaic spelling of words like olde."
  (Mary Louise Edwards and Lawrence D. Shriberg, Phonology: Applications in Communicative Disorders. College-Hill Press, 1983)