English compound
English grammar series
English grammar
• Contraction
• Disputes in English grammar
• English compound
• English honorifics
• English personal pronouns
• English plural
• English relative clauses
• English verbs
• English conjugation tables
• English irregular verbs
• English modal verb
• Gender in English
A compound is a word composed of more
than one free morpheme.
English compounds may be classified in
several ways, such as the word classes or the
semantic relationship of their components.
Examples by word class
Modifier
Head
Compound
noun
noun
football
adjective
noun
blackboard
verb
noun
breakwater
preposition
noun
underworld
noun
adjective
snowwhite
adjective
adjective
blue-green
verb
adjective
tumbledown
preposition
adjective
over-ripe
noun
verb
browbeat
adjective
verb
highlight
verb
verb
freeze-dry
preposition
verb
undercut
noun
preposition
love-in
adjective
preposition
forthwith
verb
preposition
takeout
preposition
preposition
without
Compound nouns
Most English compound nouns are noun
phrases (= nominal phrases) that include a
noun modified by adjectives or attributive
nouns. Due to the English tendency towards
conversion, the two classes are not always
easily distinguished. Most English compound
nouns that consist of more than two words
can be constructed recursively by combining
two words at a time. Combining "science"
and "fiction", and then combining the result-
ing compound with "writer", for example, can
construct
the compound "science fiction
writer". Some compounds, such as salt and
pepper or mother-of-pearl, cannot be con-
structed in this way, however.
Types of compound nouns
Since English is a mostly analytic language,
unlike most other Germanic languages, it
creates compounds by concatenating words
without case markers. As in other Germanic
languages, the compounds may be arbitrarily
long. However, this is obscured by the fact
that the written representation of long com-
pounds always contains blanks. Short com-
pounds may be written in three different
ways, which do not corre