• Back-formations may fill structural as well as semantic gaps: aircraft formate when flying in formation, commentators commentate when reporting on games.
  • Back-formation may be similar to the reanalyses or folk etymologies when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word.
  • In linguistics, back-formation is the process of forming a new word (a neologism) by removing actual or supposed affixes from another word.
  • Back-formation is a minor word-formation process, but it holds a special position among the other types of the word formation process.
  • Wondering where “edit” comes from? It’s a result of back-formation. Take away the “-or” from “editor,” and you create the word “edit.”
  • Back-formation is the reverse of affixation, being the analogical creation of a new word from an existing word falsely assumed to be its derivative.
  • However, there are also other forms of back-formation. Here are the most common forms with examples: Latin nouns ending with -ion to verbs
  • Would you have guessed that the verb donate is a back-formation from the noun donation? Or that curate is derived from curator?