back-formation

Definition:

The process of forming a new word (a neologism) by extracting actual or supposed affixes from another word; shortened words created from longer words. Verb: back-form (itself a back-formation).

See also:

• Apocope
• Backronym
• Elision
• Etymology
• Where Do New Words Come From?
• Word Formation

Etymology:

Coined in 1897 by James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary

Examples and Observations:

• singular noun pea from the older English plural pease



• the verb burgle from the older English noun burglar



• the verb diagnose from the older English noun diagnosis



• "He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the subject."
  (P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters, 1938)



• "Stripping the in- from inchoate is known as back-formation, the same process that has given us words like peeve (from peevish), surveil (from surveillance) and enthuse (from enthusiasm). There’s a long linguistic tradition of removing parts of words that look like prefixes and suffixes to come up with 'roots' that weren’t there to begin with."
  (Ben Zimmer, "Choate." The New York Times, Jan. 3, 2010)



• "Alan Prince studied a girl who . . . was delighted by her discovery that eats and cats were really eat + -s and cat + -s. She used her new suffix snipper to derive mik (mix), upstair, downstair, clo (clothes), len (lens), brefek (from brefeks, her word for breakfast), trappy (trapeze), even Santa Claw. Another child, overhearing his mother say they had booze in the house, asked what a 'boo' was. One seven-year-old said of a sports match, 'I don't care who they're going to verse,' from expressions like the Red Sox versus the Yankees."
  (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. HarperCollins, 1999)



• "Back formation continues to make a few contributions to the language. Television has given televise on the model of revise/revision, and donation has given donate on the model of relate/relation. Babysitter and stage manager have given babysit and stage manage for obvious reasons. More remote was the surprising lase from laser (the latter an acronym for 'lightwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation'), recorded from 1966."
  (W.F. Bolton, A Living Language: The History and Structure of English. Random House, 1982)



• Filling a Void
  "Backformations are more likely to occur with very strongly entrenched patterns and they have the effect of filling an apparent void. The process has given us common verbs such as afflict (from affliction), enthuse (from enthusiasm), laze (from lazy), liaise from liaison), aggress (from aggression), televise (from television), housekeep (from housekeeper), jell (from jelly), and many more."
  (Kate Burridge, Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History. HarperCollins Australia, 2011)

Pronunciation: BAK for-MAY-shun

Also Known As: back-derivation