Adjacent Words

morphology definitions

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WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

n
1: the branch of biology that deals with the structure of animals and plants
2: studies of the rules for forming admissible words
3: the admissible arrangement of sounds in words [syn: morphology, sound structure, syllable structure, word structure]
4: the branch of geology that studies the characteristics and configuration and evolution of rocks and land forms [syn: morphology, geomorphology]

Merriam Webster's

noun Etymology: German Morphologie, from morph- + -logie -logy Date: 1830 1. a. a branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of animals and plants b. the form and structure of an organism or any of its parts 2. a. a study and description of word formation (as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language b. the system of word-forming elements and processes in a language 3. a. a study of structure or form b. structure, form 4. the external structure of rocks in relation to the development of erosional forms or topographic features • morphological also morphologic adjective • morphologically adverb • morphologist noun

Britannica Concise

In biology, the study of the size, shape, and structure of organisms in relation to some principle or generalization. Whereas anatomy describes the structure of organisms, morphology explains the shapes and arrangement of parts of organisms in terms of such general principles as evolutionary relations, function, and development. In linguistics, the internal construction system of words and its study. Languages vary widely in the number of morphemes a word can have. English has many words with multiple morphemes (e.g., replacement is composed of re-, place, and -ment). Many Amer. Indian languages have a highly complex morphology; other languages, such as Chinese, have a very simple one. Morphology includes the grammatical processes of inflection, marking categories like person, tense, and case (e.g., the -s in jumps marks the third-person singular in the present tense), and derivation, the formation of new words from existing words (e.g., acceptable from accept). In biology, the study of the size, shape, and structure of organisms in relation to some principle or generalization. Whereas anatomy describes the structure of organisms, morphology explains the shapes and arrangement of parts of organisms in terms of such general principles as evolutionary relations, function, and development. In linguistics, the internal construction system of words and its study. Languages vary widely in the number of morphemes a word can have. English has many words with multiple morphemes (e.g., replacement is composed of re-, place, and -ment). Many Amer. Indian languages have a highly complex morphology; other languages, such as Chinese, have a very simple one. Morphology includes the grammatical processes of inflection, marking categories like person, tense, and case (e.g., the -s in jumps marks the third-person singular in the present tense), and derivation, the formation of new words from existing words (e.g., acceptable from accept).

Oxford Reference Dictionary

n. the study of the forms of things, esp.: 1 Biol. the study of the forms of organisms. 2 Philol. a the study of the forms of words. b the system of forms in a language. Derivatives: morphological adj. morphologically adv. morphologist n. Etymology: Gk morphe form + -LOGY

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Morphology Mor*phol"o*gy, n. [Gr. ? form + -logy: cf. F. morphologie.] (Biol.) That branch of biology which deals with the structure of animals and plants, treating of the forms of organs and describing their varieties, homologies, and metamorphoses. See Tectology, and Promorphology.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary

The morphology of something is its form and structure. In linguistics, morphology refers to the way words are constructed with stems, prefixes, and suffixes. (TECHNICAL)

Moby Thesaurus

IC analysis, accidence, affix, affixation, allomorph, anatomist, anatomy, angiography, angiology, anthropotomy, bound morpheme, bowwow theory, comparative linguistics, conjugation, cutting, declension, derivation, descriptive grammar, descriptive linguistics, dialectology, difference of form, dingdong theory, enclitic, etymology, form, formative, free form, generative grammar, geomorphology, glossematics, glossology, glottochronology, glottology, grammar, grammatical analysis, grammatical theory, grammaticality, graphemics, histologist, histology, historical linguistics, immediate constituent analysis, infix, infixation, inflection, language study, lexicology, lexicostatistics, linguistic geography, linguistic science, linguistics, mathematical linguistics, morph, morpheme, morphemic analysis, morphemics, morphologist, morphophonemics, myography, myology, organography, organology, osteography, osteology, paleography, paradigm, parsing, philology, phonetics, phonology, phrase-structure grammar, prefix, prefixation, proclitic, psycholinguistics, radical, root, rules of language, school grammar, semantics, sociolinguistics, splanchnography, splanchnology, stem, stratificational grammar, structural grammar, structuralism, suffix, suffixation, syntactics, tagmemic analysis, tectology, theme, traditional grammar, transformational grammar, transformational linguistics, word-formation, zootomy