“DISABUSE, v.t. To present your neighbor with another and better error than the one which he has deemed it advantageous to embrace.” — Ambrose Bierce, 1906
Back-formation is the process of shortening words and creating new words by removing part of the word. The back-formation typically has an additional or sometimes opposite meaning from the original word.
The portions of the words that are removed are called affixes, such as such as -un, -ation, anti-, pre- etc.
James Murray, the primary editor of The Oxford English Dictionary, first coined the term in 1889 from the definition of burgle, which was back-formed from burglar.
When we hear back-formations used in sentences, the words seem familiar yet strange. We immediately understand their meaning because of our familiarity with the original word, but there might be something a little off about others.
The humor writer P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves, picked up on this and employed it perfectly in The Code of the Woosters in 1938:
“If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
Still, there are some words that we probably don’t even realize are back-formations because they’ve become so accepted into our vocabulary.
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