Welcome to the Morphodex! <Morph> denotes “shape, form,” <o> is a connecting vowel, and <Dex> is a clip of index denoting “collection.” The Morphodex is a collection of morphemes in the English language.

Linguists estimate that the English language currently has at least 50,000 morphemes (with some estimates at 80,000 or 100,000), but, because language is infinite and everchanging, the exact amount changes all the time. The Morphodex is a collection in progress of English morphemes. As I perform my own word studies, I will update the Morphodex with additional morphemes. No source of words and word parts is ever complete and finished.

The Morphodex currently contains 6,500 entries (13% to 6.5% of the total estimated number of English morphemes).

Morphology and Morphemes

Morphology is the study of the structure of morphemes in a language, or the study of words and parts of words. Consisting of one or more graphemes, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of a language. A morpheme is a word part. Bases, prefixes, suffixes, interfixes, and connecting vowels are morphemes.

A base is a morpheme that forms the foundation of a word. A base holds the key to the meaning of the word that contains the base. Every word consists of a minimum of one base. A free base is a morpheme that can stand on its own as a word. A bound base must attach to another morpheme to create a word. Take the free base <Earth> and the bound base <Ge> as examples:

An affix is a bound morpheme that attaches to another morpheme to form either a new word or a new form of the same word. A prefix is a bound morpheme that attaches to the beginning of another morpheme. A suffix is a bound morpheme that attaches to the end of another morpheme. An interfix is a bound morpheme that connects two morphemes. A type of interfix, a connecting vowel is a <e>,<i>, <o>, or <u> that joins together two morphemes. Affixes cannot stand alone as words. An affix must attach, either directly or through another affix, to a base.

Searching the Morphodex

Using the Morphodex is similar to using other collections of words such as dictionaries. The difference is that the Morphodex is a collection of morphemes, not complete words. The morphemes listed on the main page of the Morphodex are in order of creation.

Users can first search the Morphodex by morpheme. For example, typing Dice in the search box yields the entry for Dice as well as related entries such as Judge, which is a compound of ius + dicere (the source of Dice), and Dict, which is the twin base of Dice.

If a morpheme is allomorphic, the realized morphemes are listed in brackets after the parentheticalized morpheme. For example, the morpheme -(i)l(e) surfaces as the allomorphs -ile, -il, and -le. The entry for the morpheme thus appears as -(i)l(e) [-ile, -il, -le].

Users can also search by whole words. For example, searching for geode brings up the entries for the suffix -ode and the base Ge. The Morphodex does not list every possible word built from each morpheme. Thus, if a user cannot find an entry for a word, try searching for related words. For example, the words geology, geometry and geography also bring up the entry for Ge.

Users can finally search by morpheme origin. For example, to find what morphemes, if any, came from Greek bios, typing bios into the search box returns the entries for the base Bi. Searching for the Latin tenere brings up entries for the bases Tain, Tene, Tent, and Tine, all of which descended from the Latin.

Reading the Morphodex Entries

Every entry of the Morphodex includes information about Morpheme, Type, Denotation, Etymology, and Evidence. Other information includes See Also, Notes, Twin, and Doublet, which appears on applicable entries.

The Morpheme section lists the morpheme and realized allomorphs when applicable. Bases are capitalized. Affixes include hyphens. The hyphen denotes the form of the affix with prefixes with a hyphen on the end, suffixes with a hyphen on the front, and interfixes with hyphens on both ends. The Type section additionally lists the type of morpheme as a free base, bound base, prefix, suffix, interfix, or connecting vowel.

The Denotation section lists what the morpheme denotes, or means. As largely lexical forms, bases are easiest to denote. For example, the denotation for the base Act is “do, perfom, set in motion, keep in movement.” Functional bases include a description of the base. For example, the denotation for the base The reads “definite article.” Likewise, affixes exist on a lexical-functional continuum, so denotations vary from “Greek singular suffix” for -a to “across, over, beyond, through, on the other side of, go beyond” for trans-.

The Etymology entries lists the history of each morpheme. Etymologies go back only to attested forms such as Old English, Latin, and Greek. Hypothesized older forms such as Proto-Indo-European are not included.

The Evidence section lists words built with the morpheme to provide proof of the existence of the morpheme. For example, evidence for the -eme suffix from the Greek -ēmē includes words such as diasteme, epistemic, grapheme, lexeme, morpheme, and phoneme.

Additional sections on applicable entries include See Also, Notes, Modern Base Analysis, Doublet, and Homographs. The information in the See Also section links to relevant morphemes. For example, the entry for Lone links to the entries for Al(l) and One in the See Also section. Any notes on a morpheme are listed under the Notes section. In the rare case of multiple analyses, which sometimes occur with suffixal constructions, the Modern Base Analysis explains the modern analysis without the suffixal construction(s), which is a new unanalyzable suffix that originates from a combination of other suffixes and typically occurs in more modern words. Doublets, which are words that share the same etymological origin, are listed in the Doublet section. The Homographs section lists any homographic morphemes.