cranberry word
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.17 in modern English
24
Scrabble Score
13
Letters
4
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A word used only in certain fixed phrases or idioms, with a meaning that is otherwise opaque; often a fossil word.
noun
A word that contains a cranberry morpheme.
Example Sentences
- "Likewise, cranberry words like the underlined words in hediye jawa ‘to be bored to death’ and keMce jawa ‘to go wrong (said of plans)’ were cited by P. Dasgupta (1980: 99–101) as evidence for a base-generated V V analysis of the compound verb construction."
- "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."
- "(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.”"
- "The bound morphs cran-, mul- and huckle- occur only in these forms in the entire language. […] The knotty issues raised by cranberry words are of wider relevance. There are many other situations where the zeal with which the linguist identifies morphemes has to be tempered."
- "However, such problem cases also appear in morphology, in so-called cranberry''' words, where the morphemic status of cran- is far from settled."
Etymology
From or by analogy with cranberry morpheme.