Clipping (morphology)

In linguistics, clipping, also called truncation or shortening, is word formation by removing some segments of an existing word to create a synonym. Clipping differs from abbreviation, which is based on a shortening of the written, rather than the spoken, form of an existing word or phrase. Clipping is also different from back-formation, which proceeds by (pseudo-)morpheme rather than segment, and where the new word may differ in sense and word class from its source. According to Hans Marchand, clippings are not coined as words belonging to the core lexicon of a language. They originate as jargon or slang of an in-group, such as schools, army, police, and the medical profession. For example, , , and originated in school slang; and = credit) in stock-exchange slang; and and in army slang. Clipped forms can pass into common usage when they are widely useful, becoming part of standard English, which most speakers would agree has happened with math/maths, lab, exam, phone (from telephone), fridge (from refrigerator), and various others. When their usefulness is limited to narrower contexts, they remain outside the standard register. Many, such as mani and pedi for manicure and pedicure or mic/mike for microphone, occupy a middle ground in which their appropriate register is a subjective judgment, but succeeding decades tend to see them become more widely used. According to ru, clipping mainly consists of the following types: Final clipping or apocope Initial clipping, apheresis, or procope Medial clipping or syncope Complex clipping, creating clipped compounds Final and initial clipping may be combined and result in curtailed words with the middle part of the prototype retained, which usually includes the syllable with primary stress. Examples: fridge (refrigerator), Polly (Apollinaris), rona (coronavirus), shrink (head-shrinker), tec (detective); also flu (which omits the stressed syllable of influenza), jams (retaining the binary noun -s of pajamas/pyjamas) or jammies (adding diminutive -ie).