Prefix
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix un- is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can be either inflectional, creating a new form of the word with the same basic meaning and same lexical category (but playing a different role in the sentence), or derivational, creating a new word with a new semantic meaning and sometimes also a different lexical category. Prefixes, like all other affixes, are usually bound morphemes. In English, there are no inflectional prefixes; English uses suffixes instead for that purpose. The word prefix is itself made up of the stem fix (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix pre- (meaning "before"), both of which are derived from Latin roots.
Words
This table shows the example usage of word lists for keywords extraction from the text above.
Word | Word Frequency | Number of Articles | Relevance |
---|---|---|---|
prefix | 7 | 2131 | 0.304 |
word | 8 | 36713 | 0.222 |
prefixes | 4 | 384 | 0.212 |
preformative | 2 | 2 | 0.164 |
inflectional | 2 | 85 | 0.123 |