Morphology

How to spell morphology

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce morphology

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does morphology mean?

1. nounThe study of the form and structure of organisms, or the form and structure of something itself.
2. nounThe branch of linguistics concerned with how words are formed from smaller meaningful parts such as roots and affixes.

Morphology in a sentence

• The biology exam covered the morphology of flowering plants.

• The course on morphology explained how prefixes and suffixes change a word's meaning.

• The geologist mapped the morphology of the river valley over thousands of years.

• The morphology of English relies less on word endings than that of Latin does.

Where does morphology come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word is built from the Greek morphe, meaning 'form' or 'shape', joined to the familiar combining form -logy, from logia, meaning 'the study of'. It was coined as a technical term in German, Morphologie, where the writer and natural philosopher Goethe used it around 1800 for the study of organic form, and it passed into English in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. From biology, where it names the study of the structure of living things, the term spread to linguistics, where it describes the study of how words are built from smaller meaningful parts. The same morphe shows up in relatives such as 'metamorphosis' (a change of form) and 'amorphous' (without shape), and in the science-fiction-flavoured 'morph'. The main spelling trap is the silent connecting structure 'morph-o-logy': writers must remember the 'ph' for the /f/ sound and the linking 'o', not an 'a', before the ending.

How the word is built

• morph- (from Greek morphe: form, shape)
• -o- (connecting vowel)
• -logy (from Greek logia: study of)