Morph

How to spell morph

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce morph

What does morph mean?

1. verbTo change gradually and smoothly from one form, shape, or state into another.

Morph in a sentence

• The animation software can morph one face into another over several seconds.

• The small startup began to morph into a global company.

Where does morph come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is a modern clipping of older terms built on the Greek root morphe, which literally meant 'form' or 'shape'. That same root sits inside metamorphosis, the ancient word for a transformation from one shape into another, and inside amorphous, meaning 'without form'. The standalone verb morph emerged in the late twentieth century, popularised by computer graphics and film, where 'morphing' described smoothly transforming one image into another frame by frame. From that visual sense it spread quickly into everyday speech to mean any gradual change of form or character. As a noun it had earlier been adopted by biologists and linguists to label a distinct variant form, so the short spelling preserves the original Greek 'ph' that signals its classical ancestry.

How the word is built

• morph (from Greek morphe: form, shape)