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From www.thoughtco.com
Updated May 05, 2017
In English grammar and morphology, a prefix is a letter or group of letters attached to the
beginning of a word that partly indicates its meaning,
including such as examples as "anti-" to mean against,
"co-" to mean with, "mis-" to mean wrong or bad, and
"trans-" to mean across.
The most common prefixes in English are those that express negation like "a-" in the
word asexual, "in-" in the word incapable, and "un-" in the
word unhappy — these negations immediately alter the meaning of the words the
are added to, but some prefixes merely change the form.
Interestingly enough, the word prefix itself contains the
prefix "pre-" which means before and the root word fix which means to fasten or
place, thus the word itself means "to place before." letter groups
attached to the ends of words, conversely, are called suffixes while both belong to the larger group of
morphemes known as affixes.
Prefixes are bound morphemes, which means they
can't stand alone. Generally, if a group of letters is a prefix, it can't also
be a word. However, prefixation, or the process of adding a prefix to a word,
is a common way of forming new words in English.
General Rules and Exceptions to Them
Although there are several common prefixes in English, not all
usage rules apply universally, at least in terms of definition. For instance,
the prefix "sub-" can either mean "something below" the
root word or that the root word is "below something."
James J. Hurford argues in "Grammer: A Student's
Guide" that "there are many words in English which look as if they
begin with a familiar prefix, but in which it is not clear what meaning to
attach either to the prefix or to the remainder of the word, in order to arrive
at the meaning of the whole word." Essentially, this means that sweeping
rules about prefixes like "ex-" in exercise and excommunicate cannot
be applied.
However, there are still some general rules that do apply to
all prefixes, namely that they are typically set as part of the new word, with
hyphens only appearing in the case of the base word starting with a capital
letter or the same vowel that the prefix ends with. In "The Cambridge
Guide to English Usage" by Pam Peters, though, the author does posit that
"in well-established cases of this type, the hyphen becomes optional, as
with cooperate."
Nano-, Dis-, Mis- and Other Oddities
Technology especially utilizes prefixes as our technological
and computer worlds get smaller and smaller. Alex Boese notes in the 2008
Smithsonian article "Electrocybertronics," that "lately the
prefix trend has been shrinking; during the 1980s, 'mini-' gave way to
'micro-,' which yielded to 'nano'" and that these units of measurement
have since transcended their original meaning.
In a similar way, the prefixes "dis-" and
"mis-" have come to slightly transcend their original intent. Still,
James Kilpatrick claims in his 2007 article "To 'dis,' or Not to
'dis,'" that there are 152 "dis-" words and 161 "mis-"
words in contemporary lexicography. However, many of these are never spoken
like the word "misact," which starts the "mis- list," as he
calls it.
The prefix "pre-" also has a bit of confusion in
modern vernacular. George Carlin famously jokes about the everyday occurrence
at the airport called "pre-boarding." According to the standard
definition of the prefix, "preboarding" should meaning before
boarding, but as Carlin puts it "What does it mean to pre-board? Do you
get on [a plane] before you get on?"
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