If. Back-formation|

Back-formation is very close to shortening as it occurs when a suffix (or a morph perceived as a suffix) is removed from a word (to edit from an editor, to beg from a beggar, homesick from homesickness). Words derived by means of back-formation look morphologically more simple (edit, beg) than the words they have originated from (editor, beggar). Nowadays back-formation is mainly characteristic of verbs derived of compound nouns (baby-sit from baby-sitter, stage-manage from stage-manager, house-keep from house-keeper).

4. The extensionof proper namej

The names of people and places are often generalized to name the products or things they are connected with: champagne for 'a white sparkling wine made in the old province of Champagne', hoover for 'vacuum cleaner' [trade mark], kleenex for 'paper tissue used instead of a handkerchief [trade mark], coffee [from Arabic qahwa from the name of the Ethiopian province of Kaffa], and copper [an early continental borrowing from Latin Cyprium that literally meant 'Cyprian metal'].

Myths may be widely used as a source of new words by means of proper name extension, affixation and other naming processes. Thus, psychology developed from the goddess Psyche. In Roman folklore she was a maiden who, after undergoing many hardships due to Venus' jealousy of her beauty, is reunited with Cupid and made immortal by Jupiter. Someone with a mercurial disposition is unpredictably changeable, moving quickly from one mood to another. This word comes from Mercury, the messenger of the gods.

5. Rhyming slaiiH

Rhyming slang is said to have begun as a secret language among 19^th century Cockney navies to confuse Irish co-workers: apples'n'pears for 'stairs'; dirckie-bird for 'word';

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charring cross for 'horse'; trouble and strife for 'wife'; loaf and bread 'head', Adam and Eve for 'believe'. These rhyming expressions may be shortened to one word, like loaf and bread for 'head' just to loaf, causing a very specific kind of lexical ambiguity.

Identical constituents in reduplicatives are scarce in modern English, but there are more with slight changes in the vowels or consonants. There are rhyme-motivated reduplicated compounds: walkie-talkie, nitty-gritty, nitwit and ablaut-motivated reduplicative compounds: ping-pong, dilly-dally, wishy-washy, shilly-shally, flip-flop.

7. Composition of scientific names!

Scientific terms are very often derived by means of combining word segments, often of Latin and Greek origin (combining forms). In English they act as roots because otherwise there may be no other roots in a word: anglophile, telephone, physico-chemical.

This means of composing scientific terms may be accompanied by affixation, making long many-syllabled words that usually are uncommon in English. The longest registered word is nonalcalinocetaceoaluminosocupreovitriolic.

8. Echoic words, or onomatopoeia)

Creation of echoic, or onomatopoeic words, sounding like the thing they represent, for example, tick-took for 'the sound of a clock', is believed to be originally the first means of word-formation in language.

English is not as rich in the use of onomatopoeic words, as, for example, Japanese or Chinese. Nevertheless, in English there are many sets of onomatopoeic words whose constituent segments have a specific meaning. Examples of such sets are:

glace, glade, glamour, glance, glare, glass, gleam, glimmer, glimpse, glister, gloss,and glow - nouns or verbs involving something 'eye-catching' because of emission, reflection, or passage of light;

flack, flag flame, flap, flare, flash, flee, flick, fluent, flood, flourish, flow, flush, and fly — mostly verbs that denote a sudden or violent movement;

bumble, grumble, humble, mumble, rumble, stumble, tumble — mostly verbs signifying 'dull, heavy, untidy action'.

The question remains whether these words are monoradical units or whether their recurrent segments should be regarded as specific morphemes.