Linguistics lexicon handout
only once you already know what they mean (e.g. the bonnet of a car).
Sometime new words are formed by clipping, cutting off part of an existing word or phrase.
This often happens if a word has (or appears to have) an internal morphemic structure that
suggests a place to cut (e.g. burger from hamburger or kiwi from kiwi fruit), and especially
when a long uncommon word becomes (for one reason or another) more common. A very
recent example in Italian is super from supermercato `supermarket'. In all languages there
is a rough correlation between the frequency of a word and its length; this is known as Zipf's
Law (see Crystal 1987).
In languages with widespread literacy, other means of forming new words are based on the
writing system. In English both abbreviations (e.g. BBC, MP, PC, etc.) and acronyms (e.g.
radar) are common. (Radar stands for RAdio Detection And Ranging.) Other languages use
annaabi.ee 
