cranberry word

noun

Etymology

From or by analogy with cranberry morpheme.

Definitions

  1. A word used only in certain fixed phrases or idioms, with a meaning that is otherwise…

    A word used only in certain fixed phrases or idioms, with a meaning that is otherwise opaque; often a fossil word.

    • Here it will not do to say that the non-head is related to raiser by pragmatic inferences, since such compounds are possible even for speakers for whom hackle is a cranberry word not usable outside the idiom chunk.
    • The cranberry word in this idiom is kelaħ, which has no known literal meaning.
  2. A word that contains a cranberry morpheme.

    • (13d) exhibits the same suffix as the two adjectives that precede it in the list, though the root is otherwise unattested; it is a Greek “cranberry word.”
    • However, such problem cases also appear in morphology, in so-called cranberry''' words, where the morphemic status of cran- is far from settled.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for cranberry word. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA